Video: Orion flight highlights

Teams at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi removed the core of NASA’s first Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket from a test stand earlier this week for loading onto a barge to carry it to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the rocket stage is due to arrive by the end of the month to start final preparations for a test flight around the Moon.

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.

Orbital ATK has cinched $188 million in contracts to complete development of the Orion crew capsule’s needle-shaped launch abort system, resuming work stalled in the wake up a major shakeup of NASA’s human spaceflight program by the Obama administration in 2010.