NASA's new spaceship comes together for 2014 test launch

The pieces are coming together for NASA's newest spaceship Orion, with its first unmanned launch test scheduled for September 2014. The Orion space capsule is designed to carry humans farther into the solar system than they've ever been by taking trips to the moon, asteroids and Mars.

It will be the first new spaceship built by NASA since the space shuttle was developed in the 1970s. The space agency is planning to outsource travel to low-Earth orbit, including the International Space Station, to the private space sector, allowing NASA itself to focus on traveling beyond.

Orion was originally conceived as a next-generation spacecraft, called the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, under NASA's now-defunct Constellation program. When that program was cancelled by the Obama administration, the Orion design was carried forward as the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. The engineering team behind the capsule has weathered political ups and downs, but say they are glad to be approaching flight time for the craft.

Orion first test flight will be called the Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT 1), and will include a test of more than half the systems that will appear in the ultimate finished Orion. These include its heat shield, which is a totally novel design made of a special composite material and an ablative coating deigned to burn off as the capsule re-enters Earth's searing atmosphere for the trip home. EFT 1 will also test the capsule's primary structure design and put its avionics and computer systems through their paces.

On the surface, Orion looks like a modernized Apollo capsule. Both vehicles are cone-shaped and launch vertically atop heavy-lift rockets. However, the similarities are only skin deep.

Where Apollo could carry three astronauts to the moon, Orion is bigger and can take four. The 1960s-era Apollo capsule featured computer technology inferior to that of a smart phone, while Orion is controlled by state-of-the-art technology. Its heat shield is composed of entirely new materials, and many other features are wholly novel.

Between now and EFT 1, the NASA teams are working with the capsule's prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to finish construction of Orion's systems and assemble them together. The primary body for that test vehicle is finished, while the heat shield still needs about six months more. Its avionics computers are undergoing testing now. Eventually, the whole vehicle will be put together in Florida at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.