NASA's uncrewed Orion capsule hurtled through space on Sunday on the final return leg of its voyage around the moon and back, winding up the inaugural mission of the Artemis lunar program 50 years to the day after Apollo's final moon landing.
The gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors, was due to parachute into the Pacific at 9:39 a.m. PST near Guadalupe Island, off Mexico's Baja California peninsula.
Orion blasted off on Nov. 16 from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop NASA's towering next-generation Space Launch System , now the world's most powerful rocket and the biggest NASA has built since the Saturn V of the Apollo era. "It is our priority-one objective," NASA's Artemis I mission manager Mike Sarafin said at a briefing last week. "There is no arc-jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic re-entry with a heat shield of this size."
In yet another new twist, Orion is programmed to employ a novel "skip entry" descent in which the capsule briefly dips into the top of the atmosphere, flies back out and re-enters - a braking maneuver that also provides more control in steering the vehicle closer to its intended splashdown target. If Artemis I is deemed a success, a crewed Artemis II flight around the moon and back could come as early as 2024, followed within a few more years by the program's first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman, with Artemis III.
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