Cape Canaveral - A US spaceship designed to one day fly astronauts to Mars made a near-bullseye splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, wrapping up a flawless, unmanned debut test flight around Earth.
“It's hard to have a better day than today,” Nasa's Orion capsule program manager Mark Geyer told reporters after landing.
The cone-shaped capsule blasted off aboard a Delta 4 Heavy rocket, the biggest in the US fleet, just after dawn from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Three hours later, it reached peak altitude of 3 604 miles (5 800km) above the planet, a prelude to the most challenging part of the flight, a 20 000mph (32 000km/h) dive back to Earth.
Orion survived a searing plunge through the atmosphere, heating up to 4 000 degree Fahrenheit (2 200 degree Celsius) - twice as hot as molten lava - and experiencing gravitational forces eight times stronger than Earth's.
Over the next few minutes, a total of 11 parachutes deployed to slow Orion's descent, including three gigantic main chutes that guided the spaceship to a 20mph (32km/h) splashdown 630 miles (1 014km) southwest of San Diego, California, at 11:29am EST (11:29 EST).
Details of the spaceship's performance, especially how it weathered surges of radiation as it passed through the lower Van Allen radiation belt, will come after data recorded by more than 1 200 onboard sensors is retrieved and analysed.
“I'm sure we're going to find some very interesting things,” Geyer said.
The point of the flight, which cost Nasa about $375-million, was to verify that Orion's 16.5-foot (5-meter) diameter heat shield, parachutes, avionics and other equipment would work as designed prior to astronauts flying aboard.
Nasa has been developing Orion, along with a new heavy-lift rocket, for more than eight years. The design of the rocket has changed, leaving Orion sole survivor of the cancelled Constellation lunar exploration program to become the centrepiece of a new human space initiative intended to fly crews to Mars.
Nasa has spent more than $9-billion developing Orion, which will make a second test flight, also without crew, in about four years.
A third mission, expected around 2021, will include two astronauts on a flight that will send the capsule high around the moon. Since the end of the Apollo moon program in 1972, astronauts have flown only a few hundred miles above Earth.
“We've ... finally done something for the first time for our generation. It's a good day,” said Mike Hawes, Orion program manager with Nasa prime contractor Lockheed Martin.
Orion's debut flight originally had been slated for Thursday but a problem with the rocket, built and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed and Boeing, delayed the launch one day. - Reuters