The assembly of the Orion spacecraft will begin with the arrival of engines in the United States

This pompous name is used by NASA and its ESA European counterpart to describe the part of the ship that will handle the maneuvers in space throughout the mission.
The unit includes the main engine of the ship, a reused shuttle unit called orbital maneuvering system, 24 smaller engines grouped into six modules to provide attitude control and eight thrusters used for corrections. ;orbit.
The equipment includes 20,000 components, including four solar panel wings and gas and propellant tanks.
Now that this module is installed in the United States, NASA engineers will start testing it to verify that everything is working properly. Once this step is complete, the coupling operations with the crew module will begin. The resulting badembly, which is expected to be completed early next year, will then be sent to Plum Brook station in Ohio.
He will spend 60 days in the largest thermal vacuum chamber in the world. If all goes well, Orion will then return to the Kennedy Space Center to be integrated into the space launch system that will transport it into space.
The first flight of Orion, Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), will consist of an unbuilt test that will allow the spacecraft to travel 280,000 miles (450,000 km) from the Earth, well beyond our Moon, during a three-week trip. .
According to NASA, during this flight, the Orion "will stay in space longer than any ship destined for astronauts without being docked at a space station and will return home faster and more. hot than ever. "
After the EM-1 will be the Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2), which will see a crew flight into orbit, will make a very elliptical demonstration around the world then, reinforced by the European service module, will will head to the moon without landing there. The mission should last at least eight days.
The European Services Module is the result of collaboration between several large companies from ten European states, including ESA's long-standing partner, Airbus, while the Orion crew module was built by Lockheed Martin.
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