First Look: NASA Unveils Orion Astronaut Escape System Simulator Hardware

NASA's goal is to return to the Moon by 2020. It sounds far away.But that seemingly distant milestone is beginning to come into focus. NASA's Constellation Program has scheduled the first step toward that goal, and it's going to happen before the end of this year.For several months, NASA engineers and technicians have been working on the structural shell of a simulated Orion crew module.That simulated module is a flight test article, and it's part of a series of unmanned abort tests known as Pad Abort-1 -- PA-1 for short -- scheduled for late 2008 at the U.S. Army's What Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

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