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Lockheed Martin Wins Contract to Build Mars Lander
Lord_Slepnir writes "Lockheed Martin has won a contract to build the Orion crew exploration vehicle that will eventually take humans to the moon and then on to Mars. This vehicle will hopefully also replace the aging space shuttle fleet. According to NASA the vehicle will have manned missions by 2014 and moon missions by no later by 2020."
This is a MOON lander, which could one day may be used to land on Mars, but probably would require changes due to differences in gravity, atmosphere, etc.
1. This system is of a much larger scale than the old one.
2. The relative budget is much, much smaller - 18B vs 135B (in 2006 dollars).
3. Space technology has not advanced as quickly as most people think it did or assume that it should. New structural alloys tend to only offer marginal improvements or cost reductions, and chemical fuels are already pretty stressed. Those being the dominant elements in rocket performance, plus the low number of new systems developed each year to the point of testing, plus political/economic pressure leading to frequent abandoning of projects mid-development or the use of craft that justly should be considered prototypes as workhorses, cause only slow downward price trends.
Does answer your questions?
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
Correction: 18B$ is the price that craft development is predicted to rise to, not the entire program, which is $104B. Still, we're trying to do such a massive program on the cheap.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
Two more things,
1. Greater concerns for safty
2. Goal isn't just to land on the moon, but create a system where moon landing, and moon bases are commonplace.
The title of this story is wrong -- Lockheed Martin just won the contract for the Orion Crew & Service Module (CSM). The CSM is the party which will transport astronauts around in space, and land them back on Earth. The actual lunar lander, the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), hasn't had its contract awarded yet, to say nothing of a "Mars Lander."
Of course, all this is rather confusing. I follow space news more closely than most, and I often get confused myself. Fortunately, Wikipedia's article on Project Constellation (the overall architecture) has a nice overview of what all the pieces are and how they fit together.
That said, I really wish that NASA would spend this money on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems program instead, accomplishing the same objectives in a more cost-effective manner. With COTS, companies only get paid if they succeed. NASA will instead be spending $3.9 billion (assuming there aren't cost overruns) just to get a capsule, while giving a total of $500 million (split between 2 companies) to COTS in order to get both rockets and capsules. To top it off, the COTS vehicles are scheduled to be completed years before the Lockheed Martin capsule is ready.
The Space Frontier Foundation has an interesting whitepaper arguing for why COTS should get they money instead of the Orion program.
I recently listened to a NASA workshop on the difficulties of landing human on Mars. It basically come down to this:
1. To land human on Mars, the current landing vehicles for MER and MSL are too small. We need to deliver at least 200t-300t's of payload.
2. The atmosphere on Mars is too thin to use aero-braking, i.e. can't land like space shuttle on earth.
3. The Mars gravity is too great to have moon-like landing, i.e. reverse propulsion.
I don't mean to sound too pessimistic, but with today's technology, chance of successful human mission is very small. We need a technology breakthrough in order to land something that big on Mars. Two possibilities:
1. Parachute that can stand hyper-sonic speed wind. Or,
2. Learn how to fly rockets backwards with sidewinds potentially 5x-10x stronger than that of Hurricane Katrina.
Before taking the submitters/editors to task - you yourself should get your facts straight. This contract is for the Orion CEV - analogous to the Apollo CSM. It won't land on either the Moon or Mars - it's an orbiter.
"I don't know about you, but doesn't this scream cost overruns?"
See the Lockheed/Nasa X-33, $912 million for nothing; this isn't new.
Capabilities mean very little when so much politik-ing is involved.
Zubrin's very well-written book makes a compelling argument that a bit of cleverness and rational analysis would go a lot farther than the "drive your truck to Mars" approach (perfect "feel good" weekend read). As far as I remember, Zubrin was one of the people who got the possibility of going to Mars on the media radar. He also founded the Mars Society.
This process has never been tested beyond the laboratory workbench. There are a large number of very significant hurdles to getting such a system operational on the Martian surface. Among them - insulation; Mars has enough atmosphere that MLI won't work, and this means large, bulky and difficult to handle tanks for receiving the output product. Another is filtering the input feed (to get rid of the atmospheric dust), as well as keeping the filters themselves clean. Etc... Etc... No obvious showstoppers I admit, but some very definite steep hurdles.
Many people have read The Case For Mars - many of those have gradually come to understand how much of that book is smokescreens, handwaving, and wishful thinking. Robert Zubrin has a very bad habit of assuming that coming up with clever schemes means that implementation is a simple straightforward thing - even when they represent quantum leaps over existing technologies.
Much less than the amount of CH4 the astronauts produce along the way.
Back of envelope calculation
- Density of H atoms in solar system ~ 1 atom/cm^3
- Distance Earth to Mars ~ 1 AU = 23000 Earth radii = 23000 * 6400 km = 10^13 cm
- Area swept by spacecraft ~ 100 m^2 = 10^8 cm^2
- Volume swept by spacecraft = 10^21 cm^3
- Number of H atoms = 10^21
- Avogadro's constant = 10^24
- Number of H atoms in moles = 0.001
Mass of H atoms = 0.001 grams