I set an alarm for 6:40 in the morning yesterday, which is not a thing I do voluntarily, ever, for anything short of an international flight. But NASA was flying Orion for the first time and I wanted to watch it live instead of reading about it three hours later between meetings.
Quick recap for anyone who had their head down in Sony hack coverage all week (more on that in a second, because it's impossible to avoid): Orion is the new capsule NASA wants to eventually put humans in for trips beyond low Earth orbit, and Mars is the word everyone keeps using, though realistically that's decades out. Thursday's flight, Exploration Flight Test-1, was supposed to go up with nobody aboard, just instruments, and test the stuff that actually kills people if it doesn't work: the heat shield, the parachutes, the avionics.
It didn't even fly Thursday. They scrubbed the first attempt because of a stuck fuel valve and wind gusts that kept tripping the abort criteria, and the launch window closed before they could fix it. Mildly funny watching the NASA TV hosts try to stay upbeat through like the fourth hold. So I set my alarm again for Friday and this time it actually went.
7:05 AM Eastern, off a Delta IV Heavy from Cape Canaveral, which is a genuinely enormous rocket, three cores strapped together, and it's got that weird thing where the hydrogen ignition makes a fireball at the base before it even starts moving, which if you've never seen it looks alarming and is apparently completely normal. The stream I was watching buffered right at max-Q for like eight seconds and I nearly threw my coffee mug at the laptop.
The whole flight was about four and a half hours, two orbits, and the capsule got up to roughly 3,600 miles, higher than anything built for humans has gone since the Apollo program, even though there were zero humans on this particular one. That altitude number matters because it let them bring Orion back in fast, around 20,000 miles an hour, so the heat shield had to deal with temperatures near 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit on reentry. That's the actual point of the test. You can simulate a lot of things in a lab. You can't fully simulate hitting the atmosphere at that speed with a shield you're planning to eventually strap people behind.
Splashdown was in the Pacific off Baja California, parachutes looked clean in the footage, and the Navy pulled it out of the water a couple hours later. Whole thing went about as well as a first flight test can go, which in aerospace terms is honestly kind of rare and worth sitting with for a second.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not about NASA. It's about how buried this got. I had to go looking for it. The Sony Pictures hack has eaten every tech news homepage for two straight weeks now, leaked movies, executive emails, all of it, and I get why, it's a genuinely wild story about a studio getting completely gutted. But a spacecraft that's supposed to eventually carry astronauts past the Moon flew for the first time and it was basically a footnote next to leaked Adam Sandler contract details. I don't think that's a knock on Orion, I think it's just what happens to space news generally now unless something blows up. Nobody bumped a homepage for the shuttle refueling either, most days.
I was a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, like an embarrassingly large percentage of people who ended up writing about computers instead, and I'll admit watching that capsule come down under three orange-and-white parachutes got me a little more worked up than a Friday morning probably calls for. It's not a Mars mission. It's not even a crewed mission. It's a test flight of a capsule that won't carry people for years, if the schedule holds at all, and NASA schedules for this program have not exactly held in the past.
Still glad I got up for it. Going back to bed at 9 AM on a Friday because I'd already been awake for two and a half hours was less glamorous.