Orion, which serves as a cornerstone of NASA’s long-term human space exploration plans, carried out nearly flawlessly a brief but critical first flight test Dec. 5.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...