While Elon Musk brainstorms how to be the first to land boots on Mars, NASA is still working away on its own plan, and it all starts at the moon.
The space agency’s Orion spacecraft won’t be shooting straight to the Red Planet. The spacecraft, which will be orbiting the moon on a test flight (sans humans) called Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) in 2019, was built to go from there to asteroids to Mars and beyond. NASA scientists believe we need to do this Mars thing in phases, or else something could go disastrously wrong—and in space, nobody can hear you scream.
While other unmanned spacecraft have ventured much deeper into space, at its longest distance of 270,000 miles away from Earth (which slightly outdistances the Apollo missions), Orion will be the first crew-capable ship to fly that far. The solar-energy-powered ship will spend 26 days making a lunar round trip that includes a week spent in a lunar elliptical orbit and the four days it takes to rocket from our planet to its satellite and back. Solar energy that is absorbed by its solar panels and converted into electricity will keep it from crashing and burning.
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