Orion is the spacecraft NASA built after the Shuttle, and it is deliberately conservative: a capsule, blunt-ended, splashing down under parachutes, in the tradition of Apollo rather than the winged vehicles that preceded it. The difference is that it is designed to survive return from the Moon rather than from low orbit, which demands a far more capable heat shield.
Its first flight in December 2014 was uncrewed and brief: two orbits, the second reaching about 5,800 kilometres altitude so that the capsule re-entered at some 32,000 kilometres per hour, around 80 per cent of lunar return speed. The point was to test the shield, the avionics and the parachutes under realistic conditions.
Its service module — providing propulsion, power and consumables — is built in Europe, derived from the Automated Transfer Vehicles that resupplied the ISS. That makes the European Space Agency a critical path partner in the American return to the Moon, an arrangement with obvious political durability and obvious schedule risk.
The programme's history is long and expensive. It began under the Constellation programme in 2005, survived that programme's cancellation in 2010, and has been developed across four presidential administrations at a cost of well over $20 billion — a pattern of continuity through repeated changes of direction that says a good deal about how large American space projects actually survive.
It flew around the Moon uncrewed on Artemis I in 2022, performing well apart from unexpected erosion of its heat shield, and is intended to carry crews to lunar orbit for the rest of the decade — the vehicle in which people will travel to the Moon for the first time since 1972.
