NASA Decides Future Astronauts Will Fly in Orion

Press Release

NASA announced this afternoon it has reached "an important milestone" in deciding on the next transportation system that will carry humans into deep space in accordance with a spending blueprint for the agency that U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson and Kay Bailey Hutchison helped craft last fall.

In a nutshell, NASA announced it will use a spacecraft, already dubbed Orion, which was in development under a plan by the Bush administration to carry humans back to the moon. For taxpayers the decision means a huge savings, because billions of dollars already have been invested in building a spacecraft that can take four astronauts to the moon or beyond.

"This is a good thing," Nelson said of the NASA news. "It shows real progress towards the goal of exploring deep space and eventually getting to Mars. And it's good for Florida, too, because hundreds of Kennedy Space Center employees will have jobs assembling the new crew capsule at the center's Operations and Checkout building."

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in a phone call earlier today to Nelson that the Orion "design is sound and testing has proven the vehicle to be the best option for this phase of exploration efforts beyond low-Earth orbit." In the coming weeks, Bolden said, NASA will be making further decisions with regard to the "transportation architecture" of a big deep space rocket.

Bolden was referring to NASA's looming decision on building a new rocket that will get explorers inside Orion out of low-Earth orbit, where no one has been since the end of the Apollo moon program in the early 1970s. The agency is expected to deliver its much-awaited report on the post-Space Shuttle launch system sometime this summer. It will be reviewed by a Nelson-led Senate panel that oversees the nation's space program.

Under the spending blueprint, called the NASA Authorization Act that Congress passed last fall, NASA is given the goal to be ready to launch its new capsule and heavy-lift rocket by the end of 2016.

Meantime, private companies will be kept busy, under the same blueprint, building commercial rockets and spaceships to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station in low-earth orbit some 220 miles above. It's hoped they will start flying well before NASA is ready to shoot for deep space.

The fleet of three-remaining space shuttles is set to be retired later this summer after the last flight of Atlantis, which is tentatively set to liftoff on July 8. The first shuttle to fly was Columbia on April 12, 1981. Interestingly, Bolden piloted Columbia in 1986 on a six-day orbital mission that included then-Congressman Nelson as a payload specialist.

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