Last month’s much-anticipated and highly anticipated launch of Orion kicked off Artemis, the Apollo successor program that aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establish a permanent base for future human exploration of Mars.
If the mission is successful, an Artemis II flight around the Moon and back could occur as early as 2024, followed within a few years by the program’s first lunar landing with Artemis III. Sending astronauts to Mars is expected to take at least a decade and a half.
“We couldn’t be more pleased with how the spacecraft is performing really beyond all of our expectations,” Debbie Korth, deputy manager of NASA’s Orion program, told reporters at a news briefing on Monday.
Orion was carried into space atop NASA’s massive, next-generation Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which launched Nov. 16 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The mission marked the first flight of the combined SLS rocket and Orion capsule, built by The Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., respectively, under contract with NASA.
The main purpose of Orion’s inaugural flight is to test the durability of its heat shield as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour, much faster than the spacecraft returning from the International Space Station .