Orion blasts off — ‘Day one of the Mars era’

“The Mars era” has begun.

The long-simmering desire to bring human beings to another planet took a small but important step on Friday morning, when the U.S. successfully launched a rocket carrying a test capsule that could one day be headed for deep space.

{mosads}Liftoff of the rocket carrying the unmanned Orion capsule was postponed from Thursday, when heavy winds and technical problems forced NASA to pause its plans.

But the Delta 4 Heavy rocket blasted into the skies from Cape Canaveral, Fla., around 7 a.m. on Friday with no noticeable problems. The capsule successfully parachuted down into the Pacific Ocean just more than four hours later, where Navy ships were on the way to recover the vessel.

“At dawn, the dawn of Orion and a new era of American space exploration,” NASA commentator Mike Curie exclaimed at liftoff.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called the event “Day one of the Mars era.”

Before landing, the Orion Capsule orbited the Earth two times, traveling 3,600 miles into space.

It is the first time since the Apollo missions that the United States has launched a spacecraft intended to carry humans more than just a few hundred miles into space.

The craft is equipped with more than 1,000 sensors to test the structure’s design and resiliency along the trip, and especially during the searing trip through the atmosphere back to Earth. Those measurements will help designers ensure that the vehicle is some day strong enough to safely carry humans farther than they have ever gone before. 

The capsule is part of an ambitious plan from NASA, working with private companies, to launch astronauts to an asteroid in the next decade or so, and then to Mars in the 2030s.

Eventually, the capsule will be launched on NASA’s new rocket system, called the Space Launch System, which is still under development.

This story was updated at 11:54 a.m.