C is for Cookie … and Constellations. (Photo: NASA)
NASA’s Orion spacecraft is set to blast off Thursday at 7:05 a.m. from Kennedy Space Center. It’s an uncrewed mission, but that doesn’t mean the spacecraft is going up alone on Experimental Flight Test 1.
Quite the contrary, actually.
On board Orion are myriad items such as poetry, music, educational items, experiments and memorabilia from former space missions.
Seriously, someone call Mrs. Frizzle and tell her there’s a new Magic School Bus in town.
Space memorabilia, including the STS-7 crew patch Dr. Sally Ride wore when she became the first American woman to fly in space, and an Apollo-era spacesuit oxygen hose will also make the journey. Cookie Monster’s cookie, Grover’s cape and other Sesame Street goodies are on board, along with a microchip containing the names of over a million people who .
A microchip with more than a million names will fly aboard Orion on its flight test. The public was given an opportunity to submit their names for inclusion on the chip to be part of NASA’s journey to Mars. (Photo: NASA)
A T-Rex fossil from the will head to space “as a reminder of how much life the Earth has seen during its existence,” according to a NASA release.
The practice of sending mementos to space is a NASA tradition. Mercury astronauts carried dimes, space shuttle astronauts would fill a small package with personal items that had meaning, and Apollo astronauts took photos and other items.
EFT-1 will take Orion farther than any U.S. spacecraft built for humans has gone since Apollo 17 in 1972, reaching the altitude of 3,609 miles — about the length of the Great Wall of China — during its second orbit of Earth. In comparison, the International Space Station orbits Earth at about 260 miles altitude. It will pass twice through the lower Van Allen Radiation Belt on its 4-hour, 24-minute flight before splashing down off the coast of Baja California.
Related to this is one of the most interesting pieces of cargo onboard: A that won Lockheed Martin’s Exploration Design Challenge. The students developed a method to protect astronauts from space radiation. The data collected from their experiment will directly impact how Orion is retrofitted to carry crews to deep space and beyond.
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