A NASA spacecraft designed to one day fly astronauts to Mars rolled out of its processing hangar at the U.S. space agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday to be prepared for a debut test flight in December.
"This is a pretty historic moment for us," Scott Wilson, NASA's Orion production operations manager, told reporters as workers prepared to move the capsule to a fueling depot. "This marks the end of the assembly process for the spacecraft."
An unmanned version of the gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, which has been under construction for three years, is due to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket on Dec. 4 from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.