A new era of spaceflight is underway in America. The Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011 and ever since, if NASA wants to send an astronaut so space, they must buy a ticket on the Russian Soyuz rocket. But this status quo of depending on another nation to carpool to space is about to change. NASA has been funding the designing, building, and testing of a new rocket and capsule system for bringing Americans to space. It is called the Orion Program, named after a mythical Greek figure, just like the Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury programs before it.
The Orion capsule, which sits upon the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, draws more similarities to the Apollo capsule, rather than the Space Shuttle, since Orion is a multi-stage, one time use rocket, which re-enters Earth and deploys parachutes before a soft landing in the ocean, rather than the more airplane-like and reusable design of the Space Shuttle. Thus it is more appropriate to relate Orion to Apollo. The new capsule is designed to hold a crew of 4 astronauts, as compared to Apollo which held 3.
It also boasts a 5 meter diameter heat shield to protect the crew during re-entry, a full meter greater than Apollo. The larger size of the capsule is best judged by 5.9 cubic meter volume, which is more than 50% more space than Apollo. The cockpit has been updated from 60’s era technology of gauges, dials, flips and switches to touchscreen computers and state of the art display features (as well as powerful computers as opposed to the computers on Apollo which had less memory than modern day calculators!). Furthermore, the Service Module of Orion is larger and more spacious than Apollo’s, plus it houses two, 3 meter radius solar panels which extend off the sides in order to supply more power to the craft than ever before.
Read more about Orion on NASA’s website, here! Or, here in this great article.
Just for comparative reference, here is a figure showing the Orion rocket side-by-side with the Apollo Saturn V on the left, the Space Shuttle second from the left, and the Aries 1 rocket third from left which is currently used to bring cargo up to the International Space Station:
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