NASA launches next-generation Orion spacecraft, which will one day fly to Mars


NASA launched its Orion spacecraft on a critical four-and-a-half-hour test flight on Friday morning. The launch comes after a series of delays on Thursday, when the launch was originally scheduled.
The uncrewed spacecraft, sitting on top of a Delta rocket, took 17 minutes to reach orbit after leaving Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and it will travel twice around the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific.
NASA called the launch "history in the making," because Orion is intended to fly astronauts into space as early as 2021, first to an asteroid and, in the 2030s, to Mars.
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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