Astronomy

The Orion is NASA’s first manned test flight and will be replacing the current U.S. space shuttles - but it will not launch until 2014. NASA was originally shooting for 2013 - but because of technical and funding problems they have had to change the date.

Jeff Hanley, manager of NASA’s Constellation program overseeing the development of the multibillion-dollar Orion crew capsules and their Ares I rockets, told reporters that the agency remains on target for its March 2015 deadline to bring the new spacecraft online. But the agency’s internal target of launching astronauts aboard the new vehicles as early as September 2013 has proven untenable due to available funding resources.

“This new plan, September 2014, aligns our schedule to what we forecast will be the available resources,” Hanley said in a teleconference. “We are slowing down the work to match and stay under our available funding, and to do that we had to go to a later date.”

NASA’s three aging space shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - are due to retire in 2010 once construction of the still unfinished International Space Station is complete. The agency plans 10 more shuttle missions, two of which are set to fly this fall, to finish station assembly and overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope.

The agency is replacing its shuttle workhorse with Orion capsules that are designed to launch atop two-stage Ares I rockets. The spacecraft are expected to be used initially for space station-bound missions and sit at the core of NASA’s vision of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 with the help of the planned Ares V heavy-lift rockets and Altair lunar landers.