[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 16626]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          ``ORION'' SPACECRAFT

  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I wish to share with the Senate the fact 
that we are about to do the first flight test of the new NASA human 
spacecraft, called Orion.
  As a matter of fact, it was attempted earlier this morning. There was 
a launch window between 7:05 and 9:44 eastern time. In fact, a 
combination of some weather concerns plus some questions of valves 
opening on some of the fuel lines in the rocket and trying to rework 
those valves ultimately led to the decision to scrub the mission today.
  The spacecraft looks like a capsule. If we recall the Apollo capsule 
that took us to the Moon, it carried three astronauts. It was 12 feet 
in diameter. Orion is 16.5 feet in diameter and is being designed to 
carry four astronauts. But it is the forerunner to the space systems 
that will eventually--in 20 years--carry us to the planet Mars.
  It will be launched today on an existing workhorse. We have two major 
workhorses in our stable. The Delta--the Delta IV and this, configured 
with additional boosters, is called the Delta IV Heavy.
  The other workhorse in the stable getting so many of our payloads 
into space, including our military satellites, is the Atlas V. Both of 
them are proven workhorses and have been almost flawless. This 
particular spacecraft, for its first flight test, is going up on a 
Delta IV Heavy.
  As such, what it will do is first to put it into low Earth orbit, and 
from there it will be projected out 3,600 miles from the Earth and come 
back as if it were on a mission to the Moon or to an asteroid or coming 
back from Mars in a trajectory, coming through the Earth's atmosphere, 
creating quite a few g's and creating--at about 20,000 miles an hour as 
it is coming back into the Earth's atmosphere--about 4,000 degrees 
Fahrenheit on the heat shield.
  So the flight test today is to test the structural integrity of the 
spacecraft as well as to test the viability of the heat shield. That 
has now been postponed until tomorrow. It was my expectation Senator 
Thune would be able to go. As it turns out, he has to go back to South 
Dakota. I will be there at the Cape, and we will report on the launch 
later on to the Senate next week.
  But it will all be done in 1 day, and it will splash down in the 
Pacific, somewhere in the region of the State of the Presiding Officer. 
They are actually going to have television coverage of the splashdown 
because we have a Predator that will be over the Atlantic. That is why 
we have to have the weather there, as well as the weather at the Cape, 
to be exactly right so we can record the splashdown, because this is a 
flight test.
  We are developing a new spacecraft to take humans to missions far 
beyond low Earth orbit. A lot of people think the human space program 
was shut down after the space shuttle. No, we are just going into the 
new design of new spacecraft that can take us on a mission out of 
Earth's orbit as we explore the Earth's heavens. I will give a report 
to the Senate next week.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.

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