- Home
- Economy
- latest news
- Airbus offers "revolutionary solution" to space
Airbus offers "revolutionary solution" to space
European Airbus has presented an "energy module" to NASA's new spacecraft, Orion, which is scheduled to take astronauts to the moon and beyond in the coming years to achieve a major goal that would lead to orders With hundreds of millions of euros in the future.
Engineers at the Airbus factory in Bremen, Germany, placed the spacecraft carefully in a special container on Thursday, to be transported in a huge Antonov cargo plane to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first step into space.
In Florida, the unit will join Orion's crew, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, followed by more than a year of intensive testing before going on the first mission in 2020, an unmanned mission to orbit the moon for three weeks.
NASA's Assistant Director for Exploration and Human Operations, Bill Gerstenmeier, said the future production of the Orion and European unit could result in new multi-billion dollar orders for companies in the coming years.
"This is the system that will enable humans to move sustainably into deep space, leaving the earth and moon system for the first time ever," he said.
The current plans are to send the first manned mission in 2022, and NASA and ESA plan to launch a manned mission a year later, making the Orion project politically and economically important at a time when China and other nations are racing to get a foothold in space.
The European service unit produced by Airbus will pay for power, power, thermal control and consumables in the Orion crew unit, the first time NASA has used a system manufactured in Europe as a key element to supply an American spacecraft with energy.
"This is a very big step," he said, "the delivery and the trip to the United States are just the beginning of a journey that will eventually take us to 60,000 miles beyond the moon, which is beyond any distance that any man has ever traveled before."
The Orion spacecraft is part of a growing effort to bring humans back to the moon. Unexpected discovery of water has stimulated scientists along with rapid technological advances such as 3D printing, paving the way for a lunar infrastructure.