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."

Comments

Re:Technology Love you long time

[Rei]

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?

Title is wrong: Contract not for "Mars Lander"

[FleaPlus]

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.

Re:We do NOT need to send 300 tons to Mars!

[DerekLyons]

This is a myth. We only need to send 6 tons of liquid hydrogen and a small reactor. In a 2-step process you can use this to create 108 tons of fuel. You fly to Mars with just enough fuel to get you there, create your own fuel from the Martian atmosphere, and fly back. To make things less risky, we send the first one unmanned, so there's a return vehicle on the surface of Mars all fueled up when humans arrive.

And now, as Paul Harvey says, for the rest of the story. The part Zubrin and his cabal won't tell you...
 
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.
 
 

This is clearly described in The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. Surprised more people haven't read that.

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.