New NASA spaceship, the Orion, will make its first unmanned launch test in September 2014, NASA announced on Tuesday.
This is the first new NASA spaceship since 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.
The Orion space capsule is meant for deep space travel and taking astronauts to Mars and beyond, according to Space.com.
"I think having a test flight in '14 is huge -- people can see it right there," Orion program manager Mark Geyer said according to the report.
"It's hard to put in 80 hours a week and then have somebody go, 'I don't want to do that anymore,'" Geyer said. "We kind of went through that two years ago, but fortunately we came out on the other side."
The September 2014 launch will be called Exploration Flight Test 1 and will test half of Orion's systems that NASA will ultimately use in the final Orion space capsule, including the heat shield, the computer system and the general structure of the capsule. NASA hopes that the space capsule will be safer during landing as well as re-entry into Earth than earlier spaceships.
