Astronauts have started training on Orion spacecraft for preparation of an eventual trip of transporting spacefarers to the Red Planet. The test crew wore spacesuits to properly test the vehicle and to check their own ability of interacting with control systems while attired in full gear.

The Orion spacecraft has been designed to be the next space delivery system of the US space agency that can lift human payloads to orbit, and outside our planet. The vehicle is the keystone of NASA’s quest of transporting people to Mars.

NASA officials mentioned on their website, “Engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are evaluating how crews inside a mockup of the Orion spacecraft interact with the rotational hand controller and cursor control device while inside their Modified Advanced Crew Escape spacesuits”. They wrote that the controllers are used for operating displays and control system of Orion, which will be used by the crew in exercising and interacting with the spacecraft at the time of missions to deep space destinations.

The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (Orion MPCV) has been made to transport a crew of four astronauts to beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO) destinations. Since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011, the United States didn’t have any means of bringing people into space. The Saturn V was the last vehicle to possess the ability of carrying human occupants further LEO. It took retirement in 1973.

NASA mission planners have confidence that they will succeed in safely landing a human crew on Mars in nearly 2 decades. Until now, in 2014, the vehicle underwent a single test flight, when a vacant capsule finished two orbits of our planet to check the critical safety equipment.