It will be years before NASA's Orion spacecraft carries crew into orbit and beyond. Despite the Trump transition team's dreams of a crewed 2019 flight, the SLS rocket that will give the Orion its push out of our atmosphere has hit some snags. In the meantime, there are other rockets to work on, like Orbital ATK's attitude control motor (ACM) which has a pair of small but crucial jobs.

Ideally, the ACM will never fire at all, because if it does, things have gone very bad. In the event of a catastrophic emergency, the ACM's first priority is to spirit the crew capsule away from whatever inferno may be active or imminent, and its second is to reposition the capsule so it's properly oriented for parachute deployment. Cross your fingers it will never happen, but Orbital ATK's successful test from Thursday shows that Plan B is functional:

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The cylindrical device consists in part of a three-foot diameter solid-propellant motor, with eight valves wrapped around its midsection. These let the ACM issue 7,000 pounds of force to get the command module out of dodge at a moment's notice. It may look like an oil drum from the outside, but at just over five feet tall and almost three feet in diameter, the ACM is about a foot wider and twice as tall as your average barrel. And much heavier too; the ACM weighs 1,650 pounds.

Systems like this are not new or unique, of course. Blue Origin has talked about a similar solution, though one that's presumably developed in-house instead of contracted out like the ACM. SpaceX's Dragon capsule naturally has abort systems as well. But even while these will hopefully never fire outside of specialized tests, they're still extremely important to get right. And, like all rockets, extremely fun to watch during testing.

Source: Orbital ATK