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Orion Service Module Comes Together and Testing Affirms Flight Design for 2014 Blastoff
Inside the Operations and Checkout Building high bay at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a crane moves the service module for the Orion spacecraft toward a lift station where it will be mated to the spacecraft adapter cone. Photo credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – All of the key hardware elements being assembled for the Orion spacecraft launching just under one year from now are nearing completion at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) at the same time as a crucial and successful hardware test in California this week helps ensure that the Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) vehicle will be ready for an on-time liftoff.
Orion is NASA’s first spaceship designed to carry human crews on long duration flights to deep space destinations beyond low Earth orbit, such as asteroids, the moon, Mars and beyond.
In a major construction milestone, Orion’s massive Service Module (SM) was hoisted out from the tooling stand where it was manufactured at the Operations and Checkout Building (O & C) at KSC and moved to the next assembly station where it will soon be mated to the spacecraft adapter cone.
The SM should be mated to the crew module (CM) by year’s end, Orion managers told Universe Today during my recent inspection tour of significant Orion hardware at KSC. (…)
Read the rest of Orion Service Module Comes Together and Testing Affirms Flight Design for 2014 Blastoff (598 words)
© Ken Kremer for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Post tags: beyond LEO, Delta 4 Heavy, human spaceflight, ISS, NASA, Orion
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/106247/orion-service-module-comes-together-and-testing-affirms-flight-design-for-2014-blastoff/
