Media Invited to See NASA's Orion Crew Module for its Journey to Mars

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Jan 20, 2016, 03:12 ET

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Orion crew module will be available to media at two NASA locations Jan. 26th and in early February, as engineers continue to prepare the spacecraft to send astronauts deeper into space than ever before, including to an asteroid placed in lunar orbit and on the journey to Mars.

At 10:30 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Jan. 26, the agency's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans will host a media viewing and facility tour of the spacecraft's recently completed pressure vessel, the underlying structure of the crew module, before it ships to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

To attend the event at Michoud, reporters must contact Chip Howat at 504-257-0478 or [email protected] by 3 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25. International media accreditation for this event is closed.

The Orion pressure vessel provides a sealed environment for astronaut life support in future human-rated crew modules. Technicians at Michoud began welding together the seven large aluminum pieces of Orion's primary structure in precise detail last September. At Kennedy, Orion will be outfitted with the spacecraft's systems and subsystems, processed and integrated with NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) ahead of their first joint exploration mission, or EM-1.

Michoud also is where the massive core stage of SLS is being manufactured. Reporters will be able to view tooling and newly manufactured hardware for SLS, and hear about mission progress from personnel across NASA.

Individuals available for interviews during the tour include:

Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters in Washington
Mike Sarafin, EM-1 mission manager at NASA Headquarters
Mark Kirasich, Orion program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston
Scott Wilson, Orion production manager at Kennedy
John Honeycutt, SLS program manager at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama
Steve Doering, SLS core stage manager at Marshall
Mike Bolger, Ground Systems Development and Operations program manager at Kennedy
NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio
Mike Hawes, Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin
Jim Bray, crew module director for Lockheed Martin

Orion will depart Michoud on or about Feb. 1 and travel to Kennedy aboard NASA's Super Guppy airplane. Additional details for Orion's arrival at Kennedy, including media accreditation, are forthcoming.

For more information about Orion, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/orion

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SOURCE NASA