They lined the pier hundreds deep, a mass of Orion engineers, Nasa employees and their families at Jetty Park in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the United States, tensely waiting to watch the critical next test in a project on which many of them have invested the better part of the last decade.
The orange glow of the sun pouring over the horizon, they squinted into the distance at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Pad 46, where precisely at 7am on July 2, the spacecraft that will one day take astronauts back to the moon shot up, like a mullet leaping out of the water, into the sky.