[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 17203]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          ``ORION'' SPACECRAFT

  Mr. NELSON. I want to speak about a very uplifting topic in more ways 
than one. Friday morning I was at the Cape. We call it the Cape. It is 
technically known as the Kennedy Space Center. America is going to 
Mars. The first test flight, the spacecraft Orion, put upon another 
rocket--in this case, a heavy-lift rocket called the Delta IV--twice 
orbited around the Earth. On that second orbit it was boosted up way 
beyond low-Earth orbit to 3,600 miles, and then with a ballistic 
reentry simulating 80 percent of the forces, the stresses on the 
spacecraft, the Gs, as well as the heat shield heating up to 4,000 
degrees Fahrenheit in a spacecraft totally instrumented to check out 
the integrity of the spacecraft and the effectiveness of the heat 
shield as part of it--an ablative heat shield that burns off upon 
reentry--and it was a fantastic success.
  I talked about this last week ahead of time just to give folks an 
idea of how large this is. The Apollo spacecraft was 12 feet in 
diameter. It looked like a similar kind of shape, a capsule. That was 
over four decades ago, 12 feet. Orion is 16\1/2\ feet and totally new 
technology, a new heat shield and up-to-date instrumentation that will 
carry four astronauts on our goal of our journey to the planet Mars in 
the decade of the 2030s.
  This is what I wanted to share. Friday night after the launch with 
the extensive coverage that the news media gave, I was at a totally 
unrelated charity event for a children's hospital. I had people coming 
up to me and saying we didn't know that we had a space program. It is 
simply because they associated the shutdown of the space shuttle with 
the last flight of 135 flights--they associated that with the shutdown 
of the space program in the last flight of 2011 of the space shuttle.
  They now see what has been happening behind the scenes all along, 
where indeed we are in a dual track in America's manned space program, 
the one track going to Mars way beyond low-Earth orbit where we have 
been for the last 40-some years. This is a low earth orbit that 
services the International Space Station where 6 humans are right now, 
about 250 miles above the Earth doing research in the program of going 
out and exploring the heavens. The second track of the dual track is, 
in fact, building American rockets, which is being done in a 
commercially viable way to go to and from the space station as they are 
right now with cargo, but making those spacecraft safe with the escape 
systems for humans. That is the dual track. Therefore, as a result, we 
end up with NASA exploring the heavens again. We are back in the human 
space business.
  The great Senator from the State of Arkansas is here. He does not 
know I have just spoken about him. It is going to be my privilege to 
listen to his remarks.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.

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