NASA abandons accelerated Orion 2013 plan (News)

Yesterday, it was announced that NASA was abandoning its idea for an ambitious, accelerated launch of its next-gen Orion spacecraft, pushing back the date a year. While the announced launch date is March of 2015, they were hoping to get the craft up and launched as soon as 2013; now they are looking an an internal date of 2014 (with the 'announced' launch date still sitting pretty on 2015).

The Orion craft seats 4-6 astronauts (with the current Space Shuttle typically carrying 7), and is the craft planned to carry NASA's astronauts to the Moon (with Orion being launched by the Ares rockets, subsequent to a seperate launch of the lunar lander, Altair; both craft have been spotlighted here recently). Meanwhile, other nations have their own equivalents brewing...

Alt. Eagle

The Eagles are coming, the Eagles are coming!
-Bilbo Baggins, "The Hobbit"

The successor to the Apollo missions' Eagle lander is the above: the Altair lander (christened as such last December). It's named after the twelfth-brightest star in the sky, a star which is within the Aquila ('Eagle' in Latin) system.

First going into use in missions around 2019 (that's only 11 years, folks), the Altair features neat little additions (compared to the Apollo modules) such as an airlock and a 'food warmer' (woot for microwaves and their rough equivalents).

Fun fact: early rumors that the lander would be called Artemis (twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology) turned out to be false; though I'll say, that's an awfully cool name, and should by all means be used somewhere else (perhaps in exploration, as Artemis was the goddess of hills and forests) :)