and the fact that i was able to work on that book with allan shepherd, our first in space was great, it was, and congratulations and again, thank you for coming up with us, and the question as you heard jay mentioned is what is next for nasa and the american manned space flight, and joining me to talk about that is nbc news correspondent tom costello, and we are hearing people talk about orion over and over and explain orion and is that part of the scrapped constellation program? >> yeah. well, it is. the orion is the space capsule that will carry people into space eventually. the trouble is that for most of us to understand this, we have to break it down into two categories. going forward, nasa has two approaches, a low-earth orbit destination which is the space station, and a long destination, if the you will, that require heavy rockets which could be mars or asteroid or the moon. and at the moment, the plan to go to low-earth orbit is to turn it over to commercial venders and in other words, hiring a taxi service. they are still arguing over who that could be or competing over who

. >> later that year allan shepherd was the first american to go into space on a 15-minute flight aboard. one year later john glenn climbed into friendship 7 and became the first american to orbit the earth circling three times as part of nasa's mercury program and then followed by the gemini program, and the first to establish it was at lhe moon. but the dawn of the apollo program brought tragedy when gus grissom, and ed white and one other astronaut were killed. but then they were returned safely to earth as conquering heroes with a ticker tape parade with the goal of beating the russians to the moon in 1975, saw the first-ever joint space effort between the two countries when the final apollo mission docked followed by the soyuz with a hand shake of american and russian, and america would not return until the first space launch which endured its tragedy, and nasa never waivered and changed space travel forever with 135 missions inspiring millions our chief astronomer at the franklin institute has watched many of them. derrick, thank you for being with us. as we watch the final landing