NAVY SHIP TO PRACTICE SPACE CAPSULE RETRIEVAL
San Diego A Navy warship will place an experimental space capsule in the ocean off San Diego and later retrieve it as part of an exercise to help NASA develop a safe way to recover Orion, a planned spacecraft whose astronauts will return to Earth by parachuting into the sea.
The exercise will occur in late February near San Clemente Island, where the amphibious warship San Diego will put the Orion prototype into a cradle and then float it out of its well deck. The 20,000-pound capsule will be allowed to bob in the ocean for hours before it is recovered.
The capsule will be placed in increasingly rough seas, giving the space agency and Navy experience with the sort of ocean recoveries that were conducted during Project Apollo during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Orion greatly resembles the Apollo capsules.
The upcoming tests are a dress rehearsal for next year’s launch of an unmanned Orion, which will orbit Earth and then parachute into the ocean off Baja California.
Two with local ties to receive presidential honor
President Barack Obama is scheduled to bestow the nation’s highest civilian award on 16 people today, including two with strong connections to San Diego.
Nobel Prize laureate Mario Molina, a chemist, and the late astronaut Sally Ride are the local recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Molina is a longtime science, environment and education adviser to Obama. He divides his time between his center in Mexico and the University of California San Diego.
Ride was the first American woman to fly in space, and she later founded the company Sally Ride Science in La Jolla. She died last year from cancer.
Other honorees this year include TV personality and executive Oprah Winfrey and women’s rights activist and author Gloria Steinem.
GARY ROBBINS • U-T