Video: Onboard camera captures Orion capsule return to Earth

The first piloted flight of NASA’s Orion space capsule, a vehicle designed to carry astronauts away from Earth for the first time in two generations, may slip from 2021 to 2023, agency officials said Wednesday.

As a barebones Orion spacecraft awaits its first launch from Cape Canaveral, representatives of European governments agreed to fund the development of a power and propulsion element to take the crew capsule on voyages around the moon, to an asteroid, and eventually to Mars.

The skeleton of NASA’s next Orion capsule, set for launch in late 2018 on a test flight to lunar orbit without astronauts, has passed a pressurization test at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.