Live coverage: Orion lands in Pacific

December’s first orbital test flight of NASA’s Orion crew capsule was almost perfect, but engineers are carefully analyzing 600 gigabytes of data recorded on the spacecraft’s trip 3,600 miles into space to see how future missions to an asteroid and Mars could be improved.

Andrew Driesman is project manager for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, leading a team of engineers and operators in charge of the first mission to fly through the sun’s atmosphere.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with 60 Starlink internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:34 p.m. EDT (1634 GMT) Wednesday. The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage successfully landed on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.