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NASA’s Future: From the Moon to Mars

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine poses for a photo inside the super guppy
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was photographed inside the Super Guppy aircraft that will carry the flight frame with the Orion crew module to a testing facility in Ohio.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was photographed inside the Super Guppy aircraft on Monday, March 11, 2019, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Super guppy will carry the flight frame with the Orion crew module and service module inside to a testing facility in Sandusky, Ohio, for full thermal vacuum testing.

Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry humans to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain astronauts during their missions and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities. Orion missions will launch from NASA’s modernized spaceport at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the agency’s new, powerful heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System. On the first integrated mission, Exploration Mission-1, an uncrewed Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the Moon over the course of about three weeks. The mission will pave the way for flights with astronauts beginning in the early 2020s.

As NASA ventures to the Moon and on to Mars, the agency will work with U.S. companies and international partners to push the boundaries of human exploration forward and is working to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon within the next decade. For information on NASA’s Moon to Mars plans, visit: www.nasa.gov/moontomars

Image Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani