Overview
- At Kennedy Space Center, teams began fueling Wednesday as NASA held the 6:24 p.m. ET launch target with an 80% chance of acceptable weather.
- The crew—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen—will spend about 10 days flying Orion around the Moon without a landing.
- The flight plan uses a free-return path that swings behind the Moon, causing a 30 to 50 minute communications blackout while the crew passes the far side.
- Orion will test life-support, deep-space piloting and a high-speed skip reentry, with NASA noting past heat-shield damage on the 2022 test and planning radiation sheltering as NOAA tracks solar activity.
- Europe supplies Orion’s service module, built by Airbus with Thales Alenia Space, which provides propulsion, power, water and thermal control.