ORION 13... According to NASASpaceflight.com, a plan is in place that will return astronauts to the moon on the thirteenth overall flight by NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The mission, dubbed Orion 13, will last 21 days...and will see three members of a four-man crew setting foot on the lunar surface for the first time in 47 years (the last moon mission being Apollo 17 in 1972). Orion 13 will blast off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in December of 2019...if everything goes as planned. The first Orion flight will be an unmanned test flight (labeled Ares I-1) in April of 2009, and the first Orion mission with astronauts onboard will be Orion 5...scheduled to launch in September of 2014. The first operational flight to the International Space Station (where both cargo and a 3-astronaut crew will be onboard the spacecraft) will take place with Orion 7 in May of 2015. Go to the NASASpaceflight website for more details.
What’s actually interesting is NASA choosing Orion 13 to be the flight where we return to the moon. If you’re superstitious, you’d know the implications of that number. Of course, when (not ‘if’) Orion 13 becomes a success...that will make up for the drama that took place on Apollo 13 in 1970. Then again, Apollo 13 was deemed a "successful failure" (go watch the 1995 Tom Hanks film to know what I’m talking about), so Orion 13 really has nothing to prove. Except to show that the Vision for Space Exploration plan set about by George Dubya Bush wasn’t just something Dubya came up with while he was stoned on a cold January day in 2004.
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