Nasa has been practising retrieving this spacecraft from the ocean

Practice makes perfect they say, and so the US Navy and Nasa have been repeatedly retrieving this spacecraft from the ocean.

Why? Because Orion is part of the craft designed to take humans to the moon, asteroids and, eventually, to Mars in the 2030s.

And in December, it will splash down off the coast of Baja California, Mexico after reaching an altitude of 3,600 miles (5,790 kilometres).

Nasa’s Orion spacecraft test vehicle (Damian Dovarganes/AP/PA)

In readiness, crews practised reeling a mock-up spacecraft into the stern of the USS Anchorage.

The December mission will test the space capsule for an unmanned mission planned for 2017, said Mark Geyer, NASA’s program manager for Orion.

U.S. Navy personnel use a rigid hull inflatable boat to approach the Orion boilerplate test article in the Pacific Ocean (Nasa/Kim Shiflett)

“We learned a lot about our hardware, gathered good data, and the test objectives were achieved,” added Mike Generale, Nasa recovery operations manager in the Ground Systems Development and Operations Program.

“We were able to put Orion out to sea and safely bring it back multiple times. We are ready to move on to the next step of our testing with a full dress rehearsal landing simulation on the next test.”

If all goes well in future testing, a 2021 mission will take four astronauts to orbit the moon and a mission in the 2030s will carry humans to Mars.