"You wring these techniques out on the moon first," says Mark Geyser, manager of the Orion project.

"We're anchoring our models in Apollo data points," says Cleon Lacefield, a vice President and project manager for Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Orion orbiter.

Orion was originally intended to serve as a crew capsule for the Constellation program, an ambitious NASA project to return humans to the moon and eventually create a full-time lunar base.