Eyes on Orion - An Interview with Jonathan McDowell
Jonathan McDowell
On Friday, NASA successfully launched its next-generation spaceship farther than any astronaut has flown since the Apollo program of the 1960s. Though the Orion was unmanned during the test flight, which took it 15 times higher than the Space Station orbits, it is designed to eventually carry a human crew on missions to the moon, to near-Earth asteroids, and even to Mars.
Jonathan McDowell, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, works on the Chandra X-ray Observatory and also publishes Jonathan's Space Report, a Web newsletter that focuses on launches of all kinds, manned and unmanned. He answered questions from the Gazette on the test flight, the goals of the Orion effort, and the rationale behind mounting a mission to a near-Earth asteroid.
GAZETTE: I've heard this launch mentioned as the beginning of a new era. Do you think that’s true?
McDOWELL: In a small way. I do think it's part of a shift back in human space exploration. I say human space exploration, because the robotic space exploration program — both the scientific program in Earth orbit typified by Hubble and Chandra, and the robot probes into space, with the Mars rovers, Cassini, and so on — those have been going like gangbusters and been super-successful.
So, it's really the American human spaceflight program that has been perhaps faltering, partly due to problems with the way NASA approached things, and partly due to political indecisiveness.