CAPE CANAVERAL: The first test launch of Nasa’s new deep space capsule, Orion, was postponed until Friday due to wind gusts and technical issues with the rocket, the US space agency said on Thursday.

After multiple aborts in the nearly three-hour launch window on Thursday, Nasa decided to try again on Friday beginning at 7:05am from Cape Canaveral, Florida for the capsule, which is meant to carry humans to an asteroid or Mars in the coming years.

Tourists and space enthusiasts lined the area known as Florida’s Space Coast to see the take-off of the Delta IV Heavy rocket powered by three boosters, and 27,000 guests were at the Kennedy Space Centre for a close-up look.

The capsule’s four-and-a-half hour test flight is due to carry the spacecraft around the Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

The launch is the first of a US spacecraft meant to carry people into deep space in more than four decades, since the Apollo missions that brought men to the Moon.

With no American vehicle to send humans to space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, some at Nasa said the Orion launch has re-energised the US space programme, long constrained by government belt-tightening and forced to rely on costly rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit.

Potential future missions for Orion, which can fit four people at a time, include a trip to lasso an asteroid and a journey to Mars by the 2030s.

“We haven’t had this feeling in a while, since the end of the shuttle programme, (of) launching an American spacecraft from America’s soil and beginning something new,” said Mike Sarafin, lead flight director at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston.The launch aims to propel 739,000 kilograms of spacecraft, rocket and fuel straight into space, where the capsule was due to make two laps around the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean around 11:30am.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2014