miles per hour in three seconds. reporter: nasa and lockheed martin showed a mock-up of the model. patrick has no problem with a ride. cramped in there. i ve been inside that thing. you re okay with that? it would be fun to see something you ve never been to before. reporter: now, there s one big stumbling block to all this talk about flying to the moon an asteroid. o ryan can t propel itself out of the atmosphere. you need a powerful rocket. and while it s coming, that rocket doesn t yet exist. perhaps a case of the cart before the horse. john zarrella, cnn at the kennedy space center in florida. that is really cool. thank you, john. you know those claw machines with the plush toys? put your money in this one the other day and you might have gotten a real living doll. pinky included. cruze. msn autos called it the class of its class right now. but that s not the only story. it s got turn-by-turn navigation,
eventually take astronauts to the moon, perhaps mars. its first deep-space mission could be to an asteroid called 2008 ea9. in 2019 we could be sending two o ryans docked together with two crew members onboard out to do a space walk and scoop up that asteroid and bring it home. reporter: one-time space shuttle commander pam melroy says two astronauts would be comfortable inside and no problem at all for four astronauts going to the moon. in zero gravity when you can float this lots of room for four people. reporter: yeah, easy for her to say. o ryan is supposed tos safer th. in its first real test, three rocket motors produced half a million pounds of thrust pulling the module away from the pad in a matter of seconds. takes you from zero to 600
a space ship in the works to take humans to the next frontier, beyond earth s orbit, even beyond the moon. and it s said to be way safer than the chaise shuttle. cnn s john zarrella gives us a peek inside. reporter: this is the inside of the future. it s a mock-up of the o ryan spacecraft. head is going to be down there. so you probably want to kind of squat down a little bit. right. reporter: if the shuttle was the limo of spacecraft, then o ryan is, well, the smart car. designed to be much smaller, cheaper, safer than shuttle and go a heck of a lot farther. by 2015 we hope to have humans onboard and then after that it s just a question of where we want to go next. because this is a multipurpose vehicle and can go anywhere. reporter: since the end of the apollo moon missions no humans have gone anywhere except to circling the earth of to the space station. o ryan could go there, too, but its real reason for being is to