NASA’s Orion spacecraft breaks Apollo 13 flight record

Orion sets a new flight record for NASA. Thus, the ship performs better than Apollo 13.

The Orion Artemis 1 spacecraft has set a new NASA flight record. At around 2:40 pm this Saturday, French time, Orion has moved further than any other spacecraft designed to carry human astronauts, surpassing the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. At 16:17 that same day, Orion was approximately 401,798 km from Earth.

Orion sets new NASA flight record

“Artemis 1 was designed to test Orion systems, and we agreed that a remote retrograde orbit is a good way to do that,”said Jim Geffre, Orion integration manager. “It turns out that with this very large orbit, high altitude relative to the moon, we were able to surpass the Apollo 13 record. But the most important thing is to push the boundaries of research even further by sending the ship farther than we have ever done.”

Interestingly, of all the missions that could break this record, Artemis 1 did. As Space.com points out, the original Apollo 13 flight plan was not supposed to set any records. It was only after the explosion during the mission that NASA had to withdraw the Apollo 13 Odyssey command module, which set this record at a distance of 400,171 km from Earth.

Thus, the ship performs better than Apollo 13.

Due to the limited supply of oxygen in the Aquarius Lunar Module, NASA needed to return Apollo 13 to Earth as quickly as possible. The agency finally settled on a flight plan that used the moon’s gravitational pull to fly Apollo 13 back to our blue planet. Arturo Campos was one of NASA’s absolutely indispensable engineers for the safe return of astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Hayes. He wrote a contingency plan that gave the Command and Service Module enough power to bring it back to Earth. Artemis 1 carries a “Moonikin”test dummy in honor of Arturo Campos.

A few days ago, Orion flew around the moon. When the spacecraft completes a half orbit around the satellite, it will return to Earth. NASA expects Orion to crash into San Diego on December 11th.

Houston, we have a new record ?

On Saturday, November 26 at 8:40 AM ET, @NASA_Orion broke the record for the farthest distance from Earth by a human spacecraft. The record was previously held by Apollo 13 at 248,655 statute miles from Earth. Go Artemis! pic.twitter.com/B4hcXHJESC

— NASA Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) November 26, 2022