NASA Presents New Deep Space Exploration Vehicle

With the space shuttle program coming to an end this year, the hopes of the dreamers seemed to have been shattered. With America having no space craft of its own, and with the other nations clearly incapable of stepping in to replace them, manned space exploration appeared to be doomed.

NASA announced, of course, that its mission won't end with the shuttle program, and promised we'll get to see, perhaps in our life time, a human foot print on an asteroid and even on Mars. Those plans, exciting as they are, still haven't managed to bring back up the downed morale of those dreamers.

Until on Tuesday, that is. On May 24, NASA presented its plans to create the next-generation space vehicle, in essence a capsule intended to take astronauts further than they've ever been before. Called, for now, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), the vehicle will borrow much of the design of the star ship in the now-canceled Constellation program, the Orion.

The capsule will be capable of transporting four astronauts for three-week missions to whatever space destination NASA sees fit, and then bring them back to Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, just like in the good old days. According to NASA, the new vehicle has been designed to be ten times safer during launch, re-entry and landing than the space shuttle.

"We are committed to human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and look forward to developing the next generation of systems to take us there," NASA adminstrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement cited by Space.com.