This week saw the first successful test flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The ship is designed to take astronauts on deep space flights, including an eventual Mars trip. The next stages in Orion’s development involve tweaking the design based on the results from Thursday’s test flight and testing the Space Launch System (SLS) currently being developed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama.

The next scheduled test flight of Orion isn’t scheduled until 2018. At that time NASA will test the safety of Orion’s launch abort system. Still, any successful test of a manned space flight system must allow NASA personnel to breathe a little easier.

Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, NASA has not had the capability to send humans into space. The United States currently has a contract with Russia that will see six US astronauts carried to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the Soyuz capsule at a cost of $424 million. With tensions currently high between Russia and the United States, and a series of international sanctions placed on Russia over the Ukraine situation, it is not clear that that contract will be renewed.

While Orion was originally designed for deep space missions, it could potentially be adapted for ISS trips. As the BBC’s Paul Rincon points out, there are significant obstacles standing between NASA and Mars.

“…Nasa will need to design and test a transfer ship to carry the astronauts on the 16-month round trip. Then there is the thorny problem of protecting humans from cosmic radiation they will be exposed to on the way, as well as getting astronauts down and then back up from the surface. Without a real political imperative to get there soon, those technologies are going to take years if not decades to develop,” said Rincon.

It would take some reconfiguring to prepare the spacecraft for a trip to the ISS, but it should be easier for NASA to plan human space travel with a reliable method of getting humans into space in place.

It is also possible that before Orion is fully ready to carry passengers and before the current NASA contract with Russia runs out, private companies will solve the problem. There are currently a few dozen companies developing private space vehicles and some, most notably SpaceX and Virgin Galactic could soon be able to ferry passengers back and forth to the ISS at considerably less than Russia’s $70 million price tag.