GoKawiilKENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—This will be the third time I have observed NASA’s Orion spacecraft take flight. But with this one, for the first time, am I genuinely hopeful about the future of the space agency and its plans to build a station on the surface of the Moon.
The two previous flights, in 2014 and 2022, both felt hollow. NASA, an aging bureaucracy, has repeatedly sought to recapture its fading glory while also looking toward a supposedly brighter future. Agency leaders would say things like this, from then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, after the first Orion launch in 2014: “This is the beginning of the Mars era.”
It wasn’t. No one who was paying attention believed it. But it was the kind of thing you had to say, I guess.
NASA now has a new administrator, a private astronaut named Jared Isaacman. Probably the most refreshing thing about Isaacman is that he does not talk in such platitudes. He tells truths, uncomfortable though they may be, about NASA. And then he outlines a clear plan to address these ills and get the space agency back on track.
That’s why this flight of Orion, which could take place as soon as Wednesday evening, fills me with hope rather than hesitation.
Exploration Flight Test-1
NASA rolled the first Orion spacecraft, a pearlescent capsule intended for a four-hour test flight, to the launch pad in December 2014. The overall purpose of this mission wasn’t entirely clear at the time. Orion was a boilerplate vehicle, lacking most of the hardware needed for a lunar flight. And it was only flying a few thousand miles from Earth, so it would not test the vehicle’s heat shield for a high-energy return from the Moon. It wasn’t even flying on the Space Launch System rocket. NASA procured a Delta IV Heavy booster for hundreds of millions of dollars.