NASA is now way behind their schedule of launching astronauts back to the surface of the Moon and then Mars. But it surely inching its way towards its ultimate goal of being to launch astronauts safely from the U.S. soil. To focus their workforce on developing a rocket that is powerful to launch astronauts from Earth to the Moon and beyond, NASA has contracted several other private company to design and develop rockets to launch astronauts back into orbit from the U.S soil since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. Thus, to stop relying on the Russian’s Soyuz to piggy-back the astronauts to space.
Although setbacks have pushed back the timeline of the original Space Launch System (SLS) launch and cost the government huge sums of money, NASA is now one step closer to the finish line after the successful test of the Orion spacecraft Launch Abort System (LAS) on July 2, 2019.
The test, which saw Orion spacecraft performed a last-second mission abort while in flight, demonstrated the vehicle’s ability of pulling astronauts out of harm’s way if something were to go wrong during a rocket launch.
A suite of 12 data recorders helped collect data on the launch and abort procedure, and all the information will be studied by NASA in order to better understand exactly how well the abort went. The Orion spacecraft that was used in the test did not equipped with parachutes.
The first test flight of the Artemis program is expected to be in June 2020.