You may not have heard much about it, but Thursday represents an important day for the U.S. Space program. NASA plans to launch its Orion spacecraft and send it to an altitude that no other round trip vehicle has reached since the Apollo program. Chicago’s Adler Planetarium is holding a watch party to give people a way to follow the mission.
Astronomer Michelle Nichols says this will be Orion’s first full scale flight test. She says there won't be any astronauts on board, but the flight will conduct a stress test of the critical systems.
Nichols says the flight will test the heat shields, and the reentry parachute systems and expose the spacecraft to higher levels of radiation to see how the spacecraft performs as a whole.
Nichols admits the Orion project hasn’t gotten much attention during its development. She expects that will change with this test and future flights that will send astronauts beyond low earth orbit.