Space Shuttle Replacement Revealed

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the space shuttle being on it's last couple of missions and wondered aloud what was next for NASA. Well it seems they've already been working on the shuttle replacement and while it's still in it's infancy, the model is being built and then will move on to more rigorous testing.

Orion, as it is called, was part of a project called Constellation but it was somewhat scrapped during Obama's 2011 budget cuts. I guess he did a little rethinking and NASA was asked to continue the project in hopes of taking us to an asteroid and then on to Mars.

Orion was first being built as only an escape vehicle for emergency purposes but has now been expanded to be the human carrying replacement for the space shuttle.

"Orion is going to evolve from what it was under the previous Constellation program into what it needs to become as part of the multipurpose crew vehicle," NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs told the Associated Press.