Mankind will take its first steps on the path to landing on Mars on Thursday, according to Nasa. The first test flight of the Orion spacecraft, the intended successor to the space shuttle, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral just after dawn.
The unmanned $370m (£235m) mission, formally known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), will last about four and a half hours. “The success of this test is crucial for the future of Nasa’s human spaceflight exploration programme,” said Dr David Baker, a former Nasa engineer.
Once in orbit, the conical Orion capsule will circle Earth twice, reaching a maximum altitude of 3,600 miles. At about 15 times higher than the International Space Station, it will have travelled further into space than any crew capsule has gone since the 1970s.
Orion will then plunge into Earth’s atmosphere at 20,000mph. This will generate temperatures of around 2,200C, which is representative of a re-entry from lunar orbit. A newly designed 16ft-wide heat shield will protect the spacecraft from burning up, allowing it to splash down off the coast of Baja California, in the Pacific, from where it will be recovered by Nasa and the US Navy.
“Really this is just a test of the Orion heat shield,” said Baker, who worked for Nasa for 25 years, including during the Apollo moon landings.
Beneath the hype and the excitement, there are worries that Nasa’s Mars programme lacks focus. “The Nasa PR machine is good at bigging things up, but I think to say that this is the road to Mars is a bit much,” said Ian Crawford, an astronomer and advocate of human spaceflight at Birkbeck, Univeristy of London.
Nasa says it is aiming to carry out a Mars mission in the 2030s, but there are no definite plans at the moment beyond the present one – a collaboration with Sesame Street. Items including Ernie’s rubber ducky, Oscar’s pet worm, Slimey, and the Cookie Monster’s cookie are being taken into space by Orion and will later be displayed on the children’s television show in the hope that they could inspire the next generation of astronauts. Nasa predicts that the first astronauts on Mars will be today’s pre-schoolers.
The capsule itself is largely devoid of anything required for a human crew, such as life-support and command consoles. Instead it will be packed with 1,200 sensors to test its durability.
Orion is the first new Nasa spacecraft designed to transport humans into space for a generation. Its predecessor was the space shuttle, retired in 2011 after a 30-year programme during which there were 133 successful flights and two fatal disasters. With the shuttle’s retirement, Nasa lost its ability to launch astronauts into space. For the last three years it has been forced to buy seats on Russian Soyuz launches.
Orion is no quick fix to this loss of national prestige. The first astronauts are not scheduled to ride for another seven years at the earliest. This is slated to be a mission to lunar orbit, possibly to rendezvous with a small asteroid that Nasa hopes to capture and tow there using a robotic spacecraft.
In order to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, Nasa is funding private companies such as Elon Musk’s Space X to build crew capsules. This decision has led to criticism, largely from Republican politicians, that the Orion programme is being starved of funds. Although Nasa is spending $3bn a year to develop Orion and its associated rocket, the Space Launch System, the budget has dictated a rather leisurely sequence of launches.
“One could certainly criticise the pace of the programme,” said Crawford. The next test flight is not slated until 2017, when another unmanned Orion craft will be sent around the far side of the moon and back again. Baker said a Mars mission was much further off. It would need even more funds to build a larger space habitat module to support a four-man crew for the nine-month journey. But if anything, the money is getting tighter.
“Bit by bit, things are being shaved off this programme to save money. By the end of the decade Nasa will have spent $30bn for a sexy new launch vehicle and a shiny new crew spacecraft that doesn’t have a mission,” he said. “I’m a big supporter of Nasa and manned space exploration, but Nasa really has to get its act together. It does not have a credible programme of exploration.”
The budget squeeze is forcing Nasa to rely on international partners, too. The European Space Agency will provide the service module for Orion, which drives the spacecraft and provides communication and support systems. “This puts Europe in the critical path for anything that Orion goes on to do,” said Crawford. “That’s a very good thing,” he said, because in the long term it may force the first human Mars missions to be an international endeavour.
