On Wednesday, an Orion spacecraft replica was dropped by a US military cargo plane above the Arizona desert from an altitude of 35,000 feet. It dropped the craft intentionally so that the engineers could notice the affect that takes place when the parachute system malfunctions on the spacecraft.

The parachute system of Orion has 11 parachutes, planned in such a way that they can organize in sequence and slow the craft down while falling from around 20,000 mph to 20 mph. The final five parachutes have been designed to carry Orion the final 8,000 feet down to Earth.

Two of the five final parachutes were rigged by the engineers to fail at the time of the deployment sequence. They carried out the test purposefully in order to know how many things can go wrong while still producing a safe landing for astronauts on board.

CJ Johnson, project manager for Orion's parachute system, said, "We test Orion's parachutes to the extremes to ensure we have a safe system for bringing crews back to Earth on future flights, even if something goes wrong". He mentioned that the parachute performance of Orion is not easy to model with computers, so they carried out the test in the air to better evaluate and predict the working of the system.

They loaded the capsule into a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft on Monday, at the US Army Yuma Proving Ground in Yuma, Arizona.