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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."
Lockheed Martin has won a contract to build the Orion crew exploration vehicle that will eventually take humans to the moon
Great, the US will finally make it to the moon.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...those firms that lost the bid were awarded the Uranus probe contract.
Libertas in infinitum
Of course yes, there is a whole different social reason to go there and whatever, and times have changed..
Obliterate advertising!
"NASA told the contractors to build a capsule that looks just like Apollo"
Extra points were awarded to Lockheed for their proposal to use vacuum tubes.
Last I heard, there were no practical ways to deal with radiation in space.
Does this mean NASA doesn't consider radiation to be a problem, or think it has a workable solution? Is so, what is it? And isn't it irresponsible to begin contracting if they don't have a solution?
Considering that GW Bush's "vision" of human space exploration of the moon is crowding out much more productive and waaaay less expensive robotic exploration and even basic research at home, I'm even less convinced this is the right way forward. We could also consider the source, but we wouldn't want to get distracted by other failed visionary projects (such as democratizing the middle east by attacking Iraq) when evaluating a plan on its merits.
Certainly, human exploration is much more flashy and is the only type of exploration that captures the imagination of the average population. But what can we possibly learn from doing yet another moon mission? If you're looking to explore the universe, more systems like Hubble will do fine. If you're looking to explore the solar system, robotic probes go farther for a lot less. If you're looking for a microgravity environment, the ISS will do fine. If you're looking for a launch platform to Mars, the ISS or - for that matter - any old orbit around earth is much closer to home (read inexpensive).
Perhaps I'm missing. If so, I'd be happy to hear about it.
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.
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'm curious as to why you think it's inferior to the shuttle:
::shrugs::
Is it because it doesn't have wings? (You don't need wings in space)
Is it because it doesn't carry cargo? (Carrying both crew and cargo on the same vehicle generally isn't a good idea)
That said, I'm rather perplexed by why it would cost $3.9 billion for NASA/Lockheed to develop a capsule when a company like SpaceX is developing their Dragon capsule for about a tenth of that cost.
Technology is certainly not where the old predictions had anticipated. Where is my flying car!
Well, you're going to have to let a German scientist hack your foot off. Then, while you're unconscious, he and his friends can have their way with you. All for the flying car.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
A very good comment. Considering a manned Mars mission in light of what it took to get to the moon the first time, what it takes to get an unmanned mission one-way to Mars, and how many pounds of groceries I buy each week to feed just myself (a Mars mission would be at least 3 people for anywhere from 6 months to 2 years), I'm skeptical that even the Mars Direct is feasible, and there's quite a few engineers familiar with spacecraft design pushing the Mars Direct architecture.
In a world where you can run down to the dealer and buy a car with probably 15,000 parts for $25,000 that works and conveys a sense of being trouble-free, it's hard for a lot of people to understand why it takes 8 years to design a new spacecraft that on the outside looks just like the old one and doesn't even have a big screen TV, or why it should cost $100 billion to return to the moon.
In the 60's we spent over $100 billion (2006 eqivalent) in about 10 years to land 2 people using a bare-bones single-purpose system that flew 7 missions (6 landings). Now we're looking at spending $100 billion to double the number of feet on the lunar surface, and double or triple the mass landed, plus have a new low earth orbit crew vehicle, new heavy lift vehicle, and a sustainable infrastructure.
Of course the really big difference is that in the 1960's, Congress basically said "how much will it cost to get this done by the end of the decade?" wrote out a check, and directed most of NASA's resources to Apollo. Today, they've said, "Do this, but you have this much money per year and you can't forget to keep working on this (ISS), that (space science), and that other thing (aeronautical science), too. How long will it take?"
> That's my opinion. I believe I said, if we're basically giving up our lead role in space, it's not a bad choice, if overly expensive, to basically downgrade to this.
Instead of using a capsule for reentry and orbital transit, what do you think NASA should be doing instead? And what is it that other countries are doing which puts them in the lead?
An early version of Northrop Grumman built the Apollo lunar lander. Companies bought by Boeing built the Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury capsules, and Skylab and the space shuttle.
"NASA decided to do something different and go with a company that has not been in manned space before, sort of spreading the wealth and making sure they've got two contractors that know the manned space business"
I don't know about you, but doesn't this scream cost overruns?
If I am going to the moon, I would like to have a company who has a history of building manned spacecraft.
I realize that all of these companies will have a piece of this, let's hope they can dig up some of the older engineers who knew how to design these capsules without reinventing the wheel again.
Cheers,
TFG
In some ways it is better than the shuttle. For one, the design concept (cargo and especially re-entry shield as far away as possible from the explosive stuff and things that fall off) is inherently safer. It is more versatile in that it's mass and re-entry concept does not limit it to low earth orbit. It is thermally a better overall re-entry design. Even the landing is simpler, although it may not seem so at first review (the shuttle has only 2 or 3 landing options and it comes in really fast).
And there are ways that it's inferior. It can't return a large cargo to earth. It can't support major missions on it's own (like Columbia's last mission, where it carried a pressurized science module with over 100 experiments). It can't serve as nearly as effective work platform (think Hubble repair), lacking an airlock and that cool robotic arm. It will only look pretty darn awesome instead of freaking, amazingly awesome when taking off and landing. Etc.
The point that I really want to make with this post is that we are still number 1, although I wish we had needed to work twice as hard to maintain the lead we have over anybody else. Instead Russia, the historic embarrasser of riches, is hanging onto the success of their Soyuz design and doing almost nothing else. Off the top of my head I can't think of a mission not related to the ISS in years, aside from commercial launches. China is talking big, but at this point has launched 3 people on two manned missions and has an unmanned lunar mission in the works. Europe as a whole is looking good, with several major ISS modules to their credit, the Mars and Venus Express probes plus a few smaller missions like SMART-1, and a healthy commercial market, but no real ambitions for growth. Japan has stayed on the down low, catching headlines for the ill-fated but ambitious missions to an asteroid and Mars, but backing away from their original intent to contribute a laboratory module to the ISS. Only the EU and Russia have together proposed a new manned spacecraft, the Klipper, but have not yet committed any real money to it.
In the meantime, the US has continued to carry the bulk of the ISS (although as much due to our own desire to as to any other partner's avoidance of it). The shuttle has successfully returned to flight. Its replacement is well underway. Unless I'm forgetting something, with Hubble, Chandra, SOHO, and Spitzer we're the only nation managing major space-based observatories. We have probes on their way to Mercury (Messenger) and Pluto (New Horizons), a fantastic probe returning tons of data on Saturn (Cassini), and three orbiters around Mars. Then there's those indominatable rovers, which have been operating for over 10 times as long as their design goal and are soon to be joined by the Phoenix Polar Lander, followed by the impressive Mars Surface Laboratory in 2009. Don't forget Deep Impact or Stardust either, the former of which looked inside one comet, while the latter collected samples from another. As far as the moon goes, the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter will launch in 2008 with follow-ons to be designed based on research over the next five years.
And the private side of things looks good, too. The Boeing and Lockheed's Delta and Atlas lines are maintaining a reasonable market share. Investors are excited about Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. Orbital Sciences in holding up the small end of orbital things, with SpaceX coming up fast behind. Speaking of SpaceX, they're looking quite sharp with the Dragon capsule and Falcon IX well under development for the COTS program (and Orbital Sciences is subcontracting for the other COTS winner).
I think the progress is frustratingly small, but it's there, and it's certainly not backwards.
Perhaps the spectacular carnage of Challenger and Columbia will help them understand the danger of bad design.
an ill wind that blows no good
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.
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.
What I don't understand is why they just do not build a modular 'space bus' from uploaded sections using todays heavy lift vehicle's. Then use the current Soyus/Progress system to transfer crew/fuel/supplies/equipment back and forth. With the occasional new module again using the current heavy lift stuff. That way your missions would not be constrained by how much a single heavy launch vehicle could get off the ground. Not only that but the entire program would be sped up and be international in scope with each player doing what they do best.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The only way out of this dilemma is to look for phenomenon that goes beyond our current understanding of physics. One possibility is the new model (of physics) developed by Burkhard Heim. He postulated additional dimensions beyond the 4 known ones: 3 spatial dimensions plus time. Using these additional dimensions, he rewrote general relativity in a quantum framework.
From this model, Heim developed a theory that enabled physicists to accurately calculate the masses of the fundamental particles. Unfortunately, this theory is the only part (of his work) that has been peer-reviewed in a journal.
Is the rest of his theory true? If it is true, it would have incredible ramifications. It means that we can build a hyperdrive to power a spacecraft to mars in about 3 hours. The hyperdrive would shove the spacecraft into a strange place which is outside of our standard universe of 4 dimensions; in that strange place, the speed of light is much faster than that in our universe. The hyperdrive would then push the spacecraft along one of those additional dimensions (beyond the basic 4 dimensions), powering the spacecraft towards Mars along that other worldly dimension.
The American military thinks that Heim's model is valid and is actually attempting to build a prototype of the hyperdrive.
We can overcome the environmental factors on Venus?
:P
Yeah - we can - maybe - sometime after 3000AD when our craft don't melt.
I don't believe that demineralisation of bones is a straight line graph with 1G at one end and Zero G at the other. The rate at which bones lose strength must be proportional to the forces exerted upon them. In a space station, those forces remain essentially zero - except for the limited times when you are on the exercycle.
On a planetary surface (Mars), you'll be affected by gravity 100% of the time, and even if it's only slightly more than 1/3rd of a G, you still have to work against it. Suits will NOT be light - and there will be lots of manual work to be done too. So I would think that Martians won't lose all their bone mass in a year - nor will they be extra susceptible to broken bones in a short period. However, we simply do not know - and we need to find out - and the best way to find out is to send people there!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Frankly the Chinese would be the type to land on the moon and start mining for resources and say: "Screw the moon treaty, what are you going to do about it?"
Most of the rest of the world would say this of the current United States attitude. A better attitude would be to launch a cooperative project with other space agencies, as NASA has been doing in the past.
If NASA went totally robotic, yes they may learn things, but public interest and their budget to do such missions would shrink as a few nerdy folks in the bowls of mission control would actually care.
If NASA went totally robotic, instead of this hair-brained scheme they can't afford, they'd have more robotic probes on the way to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and out of the solar system, and they'd be investigating self-assembling factories which could use endemic materials to boot-strap unmanned science stations which eventually could be manned. That would set us up to really colonise the rest of the planets instead of going for very expensive weekend trips, which is what we're going to get if this goes ahead at the expense of all the real science missions.
You're right to say pretty pictures matter, but the missions which have caused the most stir in the last few decades have all been robotic - Cassini, Mars Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor, Deep Impact, Voyager, SOHO etc etc. That's where the best return on investment currently is, no matter whether we're impatient to see humans up there too. Compare that to the ISS, which no one really cares about, and is manned.
Cassini, which brought back (and continues to) a huge amount of data, cost $3.26b total
This project is slated to cost $100b (before over-runs) - that's over 30 Cassini-type missions
If they want a sustainable human presence on the moon, they should be sending robots first. They could send a hundred lunar robot missions for the price of this manned launcher.
Lets say you want to build a shelter underground on Venus. You'll want it to be close to the temperature and pressure on earth, right? We're assuming that people are going to live here.
Well, temperature is the first problem. The rocks may not melt, but that doesn't mean they somehow stop conducting heat. Every single form of cooling technology we have just moves heat around instead of getting rid of it, and moreover this is a physical limitation, rather than an engineering one (damn pesky thermodynamic laws). You need a cool place to dump excess heat into. Where the hell are you going to put a heat sink on Venus?
Pressure is the second problem. Even if you were to build a shelter underground, the space contained within would still be the same pressure as the outside air (about 90 times that of Earth IIRC). If we depressurized it to Earth standard, then we'd be up against the problems associated with the oudside pressure bearing down on the shelter, which would crush it.
On Earth the only environment with a similar pressure is about 1 kilometer below the surface of the ocean. Have you seen what kind of engineering specifications are required for a craft that goes that deep and only carries a few people? Try and imagine building a base to survive that same pressure, plus the heat and corrosiveness of the Venusian atmosphere. Now remember that we're talking about a base that's going to be there for years, whereas the deep ocean submersibles go down for hours, and that the base is going to house some large number of personel, while submersibles carry typically no more than two or three.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This is admittedly off-topic, but not intended to be wholly philosophical or controversial. I am merely curious.
In the sense of technology and forward thinking, I do not consider myself to be an 'average person', yet I have trouble understanding why to so many people, the survival of the human race is of such high importance. Naturally I agree that a single human life has intrinsic value (and therefore so also, does a group of humans or the whole human race). I have also read enough humanistic literature to know that to many people, the survival and (sort of vaguely defined) betterment of our race is the prime virtue. Yet I still don't understand why people believe this (and I hope I have judged correctly that you fit in this group).
So please forgive me if this seems like an odd or stupid question. I certainly don't mean it to be an insulting one. It's just that you asserted something quite strongly that I'm not sure I believe and so I'm curious as to why you believe it so strongly. Beyond your natural instinct to survive and reproduce, what additional reasons do you have to believe that the universe is 'better off' with the complex molecules that are our genome floating around here and there? Perhaps what I'm asking is:
* Why do you believe the survival of our species has intrinsic value?
And as a bonus:
Is there anything more important than the preservation of our species (i.e. somem particular moral)?
I'm interested in anyone's opinion. Thanks.
-Charles