Short answers, pulled from the story.
Orion is NASA's Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), a partially reusable crewed spacecraft built for the Artemis lunar exploration program. It consists of a crew module built by Lockheed Martin and a European Service Module provided by the European Space Agency and manufactured by Airbus Defence and Space. Orion can support four crew members beyond low Earth orbit for up to 21 days undocked, or up to six months when docked.
NASA spent $25.6 billion on Orion development from 2006 through 2025 in nominal dollars, equivalent to $33.6 billion in 2026 dollars. These figures exclude the European Service Module, launch preparation costs (which reached $909.9 million annually by 2025), and the SLS rocket.
Orion first carried a crew on Artemis II, which launched on the 1st of March 2026 from Kennedy Space Center. The mission was a flyby of the Moon lasting 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes; the crew named the capsule Integrity.
Orion was conceived for NASA's Constellation program, announced on the 14th of January 2004 following the Space Shuttle Columbia accident. Constellation was canceled on the 11th of October 2010 after an independent review found it under-budgeted and behind schedule by four years or more. Orion alone survived the cancellation and was redesigned for the Space Launch System and eventually the Artemis program.
Orion uses AVCOAT as its ablative heat shield material, composed of silica fibers embedded in resin within a fiberglass-and-phenolic-resin honeycomb structure. NASA selected AVCOAT after evaluating multiple thermal protection materials; it was previously used on the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle orbiter.
On the 2nd of May 2025, the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal called for terminating both Orion and SLS after Artemis III in favor of commercial alternatives. Congress rejected the proposal in July 2025, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included funding for Orion procurement for Artemis IV and its reuse on future missions.