With the moon as its immediate goal, NASA is pushing hard on deep space exploration.
In a press conference from Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston today (April 26), NASA officials talked through the status of their deep space exploration program and the upcoming launches of the agency's Orion spacecraft around the moon.
A NASA report last year suggested the launch date could slip to June 2020. However, JSC Director Ellen Ochoa confirmed that NASA is still pushing to use the massive Space Launch System to send Orion around the moon for the first time, on the uncrewed Exploration Mission-1, by the end of 2019.
"Launch [is] hopefully at the end of 2019. That is the goal we're keeping toward," Ochoa said at the press conference. "We've done an in-depth assessment of that, and likely it will be in early 2020, but we are keeping pressure on our agency and our folks to try and launch in December of 2019, to make sure that we put our best foot forward and do our best to meet those deadlines."
