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JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. — The Orion module is the pride of NASA.

The Orion spacecraft was built in 2014 and launched in December of that year. It’s designed to ultimately take astronauts into deep space.

The next Orion module will launch in November 2018, getting closer to a manned flight mission in 2021.

“The next one will also be unmanned, and so they have a building-block approach where they basically increase the complexity of the spacecraft to get up to manned flight,” Orion mechanical test engineering manager Dan Qvale said.

More testing needs to be done. But why are there 1,500 custom-made high-performance audio speakers towering over the module at its Lockheed Martin facility in Waterton Canyon?

“These speakers are supposed to essentially recreate the sound that the rocket will create on launch,” Qvale said.

All this for the ultimate goal to put someone on Mars, “This is the way we make groundbreaking discoveries by doing stuff like this,” Qvale said.