Video: Orion EFT-1 test flight ends with a splashdown in the Pacific

The Biden administration supports continuing NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts back to the moon, the White House said last week, without stating whether it will back away from the program’s already-in-doubt schedule for a lunar landing by the end of 2024.

The mobile service tower is retracted from the Delta 4-Heavy rocket and Orion spacecraft for Exploration Flight Test 1.

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.