A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
A test flight of Orion with humans aboard had previously been pencil led in for 2021, but officials say they now have less confidence in this date. Development difficulties "historically pop up", meaning future delays to the programmer were a possibility, they told reporters during a teleconference. An Orion test capsule flew an unmanned mission in December last year. It was a near-flawless outing, circling a few thousand kilometres above the Earth, but the capsule did not use the rocket for which it has been designed. This is a huge vehicle, also still in development, known as the Space Launch System (SLS). More powerful than the Apollo programme's Saturn V, the SLS is due to make its debut with Orion - again in an uncrewed configuration - in late 2018. Only after that will the pair be prepared for a test flight with astronauts, possibly taking them on a trip around the back of the Moon. Nasa had been working tow...