NASA’s Orion spacecraft, preparing for it’s first flight, departs the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building on its way to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center Thursday in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Orion is scheduled for a test flight in early December.In a region where we continually have to talk up STEM courses and prod school officials to put digital tablets in underfunded schools, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia have some 71 suppliers working to help put our next space exploration into the air — and space — to Mars.
That’s amazing and gratifying and — even challenging.
Officials at Arnold Engineering and Development Complex and Micro Craft in Tullahoma, Tenn., along with companies in Decatur, Tenn., and Scottsboro, Ala., and Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., are preparing and supporting the Orion spacecraft mission for its Dec. 4 test launch, a four-and-a-half-hour mission to make two orbits around Earth.
Orion is the replacement for the space shuttles that began flying in 1981. Eventually, it is intended to “take humans farther than we’ve ever gone before,” NASA spokeswoman Rachel Kraft told Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Ben Benton in Sunday’s paper.
Here’s the earthbound challenge: Find a way to translate some of that remarkable engineering ability and knowledge to help locally on the ground in these three states with educational issues.