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NASA has a plan to wrangle an asteroid and park it in lunar orbit, or as we've come to know it -- the plan to to give the Moon a moon. One step in that plan is to send astronauts into space to visit the Moon's moon, and to do that, they'll need the Orion space capsule. To kickstart the mission, NASA has set an inaugural launch date for the Orion of September 2014, and they've been working double shifts to meet that goal. Why the rush? It might be that the whole plan could get scrapped if the proposed NASA budget doesn't get approved.

On July 21, the Space Shuttle Atlantis landed for the last time, ending three decades of missions in space. With the conclusion of the Shuttle program, the quest to restore the United States' ability to send astronauts beyond the Earth became far more urgent. Though NASA has been working on a new vehicle since 2004, it also began supporting a number of home-grown commercial space operations. As part of the Commercial Crew Development initiative, four companies have started work on spacecraft that will eventually carry astronauts to the International Space Station -- and perhaps beyond.

While a lot of attention is being focused on the advances made by commercial spaceflight companies, NASA is working hard toward a test flight of their Orion spaceship in 2014. Orion, which is specifically designed to take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit to targets like asteroids and Mars, is probably one of the most important projects in human spaceflight at the moment. Highlighting the upcoming flight test -- called Exploration Flight Test (EFT-1) -- is a video from NASA, which gives us a vivid first look at this vital test mission.

NASA has recently announced that the first flight of its Orion spacecraft will take place in early 2014. The Orion, which is something of a spiritual successor to the Apollo spacecraft which took humans to the Moon, will be the first human capable spacecraft operated by NASA since the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet earlier this year. While designed to carry humans, the first flight will be unmanned. In a sign of the new direction for NASA, the test flight will not only shakedown Orion's low Earth orbit capability, but its deep space aspirations as well.

Though an unmanned flight of NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is still at least two years away, that doesn't mean there's not science to be done! Engineers are currently testing the Orion's splash down capabilities at NASA's Langley facility the only way they know how: Hoisting the capsule up and dropping it into a giant pool. The plan is once the craft clears this and other safety tests, it will replace the retiring Space Shuttle as the primary crew vehicle for the United States. Here's hoping we'll see this craft splashing down for real in the very near future. (via Twitter)

With the Space Shuttle about to embark on its farewell flight NASA is hard at work on the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which is derived from the Orion capsule in the now defunct Constellation project. The space agency recently met a major milestone in continuing their human spaceflight program with the first complete, space-worthy assembly of the Orion spacecraft in Denver, Colorado. Though designed for space, this first capsule has a long and earthbound road ahead of it. Now that its complete, it will undergo rigorous vibration testing in Colorado, before being shipped off to the Langley Research Center in Virginia for splashdown trails. NASA hopes to have an unmanned test flight of an Orion capsule by 2013, with a manned launch tentatively planned for 2016. That still leaves NASA a sizable gap for manned spaceflight, likely to be filled by the Russian space agency and private companies like SpaceX. But once complete, Orion could be the craft that takes astronauts to visit asteroids and someday land on Mars. (via Universe Today)

With the Space Shuttle's imminent retirement, much of the discussion about the future of American spaceflight has centered on private companies like SpaceX. But NASA will have a spacecraft for deep-space missions, and Lockheed Martin recently unveiled the first of these craft called Orion. Originally designed as part of the now-defunct Constellation project, Orion is the craft that is hoped will carry astronauts to Asteroids and beyond. Reusable and highly durable, the Orion crew module looks like a larger Apollo-era capsule but with a slew of high-tech improvements. NASA hopes to have a manned mission flying by 2016, and it certainly seems like they are well on their way. (Engadget, image credit Lockheed Martin)