NASA Looks to Speed Timetable for Putting Astronauts in Deep Space

In the first public inkling of the Trump administration’s aspirations for space exploration, NASA announced on Wednesday that it wanted to consider taking astronauts on the first flight of its new heavy-lift rocket. That type of notable mission could speed up a return to the moon.

Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., the acting NASA administrator, said the agency was studying what it would take to add a crew to the first flight of the Space Launch System, a mammoth rocket under development for deep space missions.

Under current plans, the first launch was scheduled for late 2018 and did not include a crew for testing the systems aboard the rocket and the capsule, named Orion.

That would have been followed by a gap of several years before a second flight, with astronauts, that would have taken off no earlier than 2021.

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