Project Orion: the next giant leap

NASA’s next crewed spacecraft is now under development and represents a return to the design philosophy of the Apollo era. Stuart Nathan reports

Since the last flight of the Space Shuttle in 2011, there has only been one way to get humans into space: the Soyuz system, using the capsule design that has been in operation since 1968 with only minor changes; the most recent was in 2010 and that module was intended to go out of service the following year. It’s a highly reliable system, but a Soyuz is nobody’s idea of a comfortable place. As those who have visited the Cosmonauts exhibition at London’s Science Museum will know, it’s so cramped that its crew can’t even sit with their legs extended during launch and re-entry. And it can’t get beyond low-Earth orbit.

NASA’s next crewed spacecraft, Orion, is under development. It passed one major milestone in 2015 with the first flight of a functional model of its crew capsule into Earth orbit and its successful return, and has reached a second with the start of testing of structural test models of its major components, the crew module and service module.