The milestone is the maiden test flight of its Orion spacecraft, a launch that has come into sharper relief in the three months since NASA and manufacturer Lockheed Martin announced it.

As planned, an unmanned Orion capsule will begin its journey at Cape Canaveral and take two loops around Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. What's now clear is that the capsule will be sent far beyond the lower Earth orbit of the International Space Station.

At its peak, Orion's orbit is expected to extend nearly 3,700 miles from Earth - the farthest a NASA spacecraft built for humans has gone since the early 1970s.

That distance is "significantly higher than human spaceflight has gone since Apollo," said Larry Price, Orion deputy program manager at Lockheed Martin. "The reason for that is so we can get a high-energy entry so we can stress the heat shield."

The test will determine whether Orion can survive the re-entry into Earth's atmosphere - where temperatures are expected to reach 4,000 degrees - in preparation for a human flight in 2021. NASA hopes that Orion eventually can carry astronauts back to the moon or to nearby asteroids.

Besides the heat shield, the practice flight is designed to test 10 systems whose failure could be disastrous, including the capsule's flight software and parachutes. Like its Apollo-era predecessors, the four-person Orion capsule is designed to land in water.

"The beauty about flying in 2014 is that we can learn early [if there are problems], so if we find something we really got to fix we've got time before we fly people," said Mark Geyer, head of the Orion program at NASA.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-nasa-spaceship.html

Just picked up on the 4000 Degrees in that article..

Is that the Temperature required to melt steel?

Steel melts at a much lower temperature. Spacecraft are typically titanium coated with composite depending upon the heat expected. Very little steel is used anywhere in aerospace.

When a tile fell off a space shuttle, the ship was destroyed by the heat that melted the aluminum structure beneath.

Not an expert but I read this and one thing leads to another

Question

How hot is it at the center of the Earth?



Answer

It is approximately 4000°C at the centre of the Earth. To put this in context:
The centre of the Sun is approximately 15 million°C
The surface of the Sun is 5500°C
Iron melts at 1535°C (when at atmospheric pressure)
Water boils at 100°C (when at atmospheric pressure)
Human skin is comfortable with temperatures up to about 60°C
The highest temperature recorded on the Earth's surface is 58°C (Libya 1922)
It is not possible to directly measure the temperature at the centre of the Earth and four thousand degrees is nothing more than our most well-established piece of guesswork to date. Most modern calculations rely on the fact that we believe the inner core to be made up of iron and nickel that is just about at melting point. It is under a lot of pressure, which prevents it from melting, even at such high temperatures. There is also a lot of evidence regarding how the outer core of the Earth convects and that helps to establish the temperature. However, recently British scientists have suggested that the temperature of the Earth's core may in fact be as high as the surface of the Sun, so the question is still open.

The question is not that open. The transition zone from seismic data is well established. The transition temperature for melting is known from experimental data in it's relation to pressure.

The temperature of the inner core can be estimated using experimental and theoretical constraints on the melting temperature of impure iron at the pressure (about 330 GPa) of the inner core boundary, yielding estimates of 5,700 K (5,430 °C; 9,800 °F).[13] The range of pressure in Earth's inner core is about 330 to 360 gigapascals (3,300,000 to 3,600,000 atm),[14] and iron can only be solid at such high temperatures because its melting temperature increases dramatically at these high pressures (see the Clausius–Clapeyron relation).

So the temperature is close to 10,000F ... close to that of the surface of the Sun. And the iron core is still solid due to the pressure.