Moon Mission Craft Will Be Named Orion
The spaceships that NASA wants to build to carry astronauts back to the moon will be called Orion, an agency official said Wednesday.
NASA announced the name about a week early after it slipped out in a message from a space station crew member.
“We’ve been calling it the Crew Exploration Vehicle for several years, but today it has a name -- Orion,” station flight engineer Jeffrey N. Williams said in the message.
Test flights of the new capsules are expected to start as early as 2012, with the first mission to the moon scheduled for no later than 2020.
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