This week in science: High flight

Exploration Flight Test 1 is due to send a test Orion crew module as far as 3,600 miles from Earth.

Exploration Flight Test 1 is due to send a test Orion crew module as far as 3,600 miles from Earth.

NASA blasted back into space Friday morning in the form of the Orion capsule atop a Delta heavy rocket stack. Unlike the many shuttle flights, this one was unmanned, for now, and hit an altitude far higher than the low Earth orbit utilized by STS and Soyuz flights:

After Orion made its first circuit around the planet, the rocket's upper stage kicked it into a second, highly eccentric orbit that looped 3,604.2 miles from Earth. That's 15 times farther away than the International Space Station.

The space station crew huddled around monitors to watch Orion's progress. "Awesome!!!" NASA astronaut Terry Virts tweeted from the orbital outpost.

After hitting the top of its orbit at 10:11 a.m. ET, Orion screamed back toward Earth at a speed expected to exceed 20,000 mph—80 percent of the velocity that a spacecraft returning from the moon would encounter. NASA spokesman Rob Navias said Orion will experience peak acceleration of 8.26 G's—far more than the 3 G's that astronauts felt during the space shuttle era.

It is high time to shoot for more than low Earth orbit and it's nice to see our civilian space program committed to that end. But take grandiose claims of going to Mars in the next decade with a grain of salt. That's a whole different ballgame. Apollo got us to the moon, using souped up Apollo to get to Mars would be like making it across San Francisco Bay in an outrigger canoe and deciding the next logical destination is the coast of Australia.

• Finally, some good news from the energy front: Gas drops below two bucks a gallon in some parts of the country.
• What science blogger could possibly pass up an article on that most alien of vertebrates, the electric eel?
• You remember those cool high speed cameras that captured events that normally transpire in the blink of an eye? Well, this ones captures a 100 billion frames per second!
• The New Horizons Mission to Pluto will awaken today. If all goes well it will provide better images of Pluto in a few months than any taken by Hubble and they'll only get better from there.