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Lockheed Martin Wins Contract to Build Mars Lander

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the up-up-and-away dept.

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."

7 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Technology Love you long time by mangu · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I agree with you, except that in (3) we do have some structural materials that are significantly better, for instance carbon fiber, that weren't used at all in Apollo, AFAIK. Also, the vast advances in electronics means that we have better control systems with less mass in the hardware. Other than that, we are still stuck with basically the same fuels and same metal alloys that we had in Apollo.


    After all, we are still flying the same 747 aircraft that we had in 1970, our spacecraft shouldn't be much different either.

  2. We do NOT need to send 300 tons to Mars! by unixj · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    1. CO2 (from atmosphere) + 4 H2 (from Earth) -> CH4 (rocket fuel) + 2 H20
    2. 2 H20 (from 1) -> 2 H2 (feed back into 1) + O2 (oxygen for rocket 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.

    The 300 tons is only if you insist on bringing the fuel for your return journey along with you.

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

    1. Re:We do NOT need to send 300 tons to Mars! by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How much Hydrogen could be collected on the way?

      --
      Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
    2. Re:We do NOT need to send 300 tons to Mars! by unixj · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.
      It's true that Zubrin's book is idealistic (I was rolling my eyes a few times). Nevertheless it is a very elegant idea. By producing the fuel for the return journey on Mars itself we eliminate in one stroke all the Battlestar Galatica-size fleets of ships necessary to transport the fuel, and construction and staging areas in orbit and on the Moon etc. It is insane that people are talking about the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars.

      Instead of blowing wads of cash on the ISS for no apparent reason we could be doing engineering on the problems you outline. Seems much more practical IMHO.

  3. Re:great by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 4, Interesting
    So really...why do we need to go there?

    Want fuel? Dip-scoop the outer surface of Jupiter for enough "fossil fuel" to last us forever. Send one per year; might take 10 years to get the first balloon full back, but after then you'd have one per year -- a tank of arbitrary size, full of burnable, polymer-able methane.

    Unless you really believe in voluntary population control, sustainable ecosystems and the Tooth Fairy to keep us alive as a planetary population, in which case I can't help you.

    ..but where are they now?

    Their descendents became you. I wonder what went wrong.

    --
    Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
  4. Re:Title is wrong: Contract not for "Mars Lander" by Keebler71 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    You are articulating many of the misconceptions about COTS that have been brought up recently in the space news. First off, it is completely unfair to compare COTS with CEV. CEV is being designed to support lunar and Mars missions. The delta-V, life support, habitable volume and TPS requirements are not even comparable to those for the COTS missions. Also, the $500M is only for a demonstration of cargo transportation capability - the crew transportation demonstration will not commence until one of the particpants has demonstrated pressurized cargo deliver and return and will be funded seperately

    Second, COTS was underfunded on purpose. NASA wants out of the space transportation buisness and instead wants to be able to allocate its resources toward exploration while paying commercial providers for cheap, safe, reliable access to LEO. The problem is that there is no provider for such services. The goals of COTS is to facilitate the creation of a market for commercial space transportation and to then call upon these services to meet our ISS crew and cargo requirements. Completely funding one of these ventures would be "buisness as usual" - just with a different upstart partner. By only partially funding them, NASA is effectively forcing them to have a strong financing plan. Investors and venture capitalists will only put their dollars into companies with strong buisness plans - presumably ones that:

    • have potential for growth (read: aren't reliant on NASA)
    • turn a profit
    If NASA can jump-start such a space transporation market with this COTS seed money, then they will be but one of many customers in a growing market (of both customers and providers). Bigger market - more missions - more payloads and research on orbit - cheaper cost/kg. Science wins, industry wins, NASA wins, the taxpayers win.

    In the early part of the last century, the postal service played a similiar role in creating the aviation infrastructure necessary to eventually support a commercial air transportation service market.

    --
    "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
  5. Re:Technology Love you long time by ipfwadm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a theory of mine that the lack of interest in space exploration is at least partially due to light pollution obscuring our view of the night sky. Whenever I find myself in a really dark place (and living in the northeast US, such places are hard to come by) I always look up in wonder. I can just lie down and stare up at the stars for hours. Looking at the hazy glow of the Milky Way, watching satellites go by and shooting stars streaking across the sky... it's hard to not be interested in finding out more about what's up there. But in many cities it's hard to even see the Big Dipper. It's not surprising people have no interest in space when many of them don't have a connection to it anymore.