Lockheed Martin Unveils Plans For Huge Reusable Moon Lander For Astronauts (space.com)

Lockheed Martin revealed its concept for a reusable, single-stage spaceship capable of ferrying four astronauts between lunar orbit and the surface of moon. Lockheed's craft weighs roughly five times more than the lunar lander NASA used during the Apollo program. When it's fully fueled, it will weigh 68 tons (62 metric tons). Space.com reports: The Lockheed lander would use as its home base the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a small space station that NASA aims to start building near the moon in 2022. The lander would depart from the Gateway, taking astronauts and up to 1.1 tons (1 metric tons) of cargo down to the lunar surface, according to a newly published Lockheed white paper. The craft (and crew) could stay on the surface for up to two weeks, then launch back to the Gateway without the need to refuel. (The lander would be refueled between missions -- eventually, perhaps, with propellant derived from water ice extracted from the moon or asteroids.)

Lockheed's proposed lander could be up and running by the late 2020s, in keeping with the timeline NASA has targeted for getting boots back on the moon, said Rob Chambers, Lockheed Martin Space's director of human spaceflight strategy and business development. The lander would also launch atop the SLS, at least for the foreseeable future, he told Space.com.

Comments

Re:Great

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Technically, just landing a BFS permanently on the lunar surface and calling it a moon base would make it a bigger moon base than some of the projects proposed in the past.

Lockheed has made big promises before...

[DanDD]

Listen folks, before you get all giddy with the possibilities presented in this article, take a long, hard look at Lockheed Martin's past involvement in the US Space program. Then, dig beneath the surface and see if anything has changed, if your tax money is being used effectively or efficiently...

NASA awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin to build a replacement for the Space Shuttle. The first test article was called the X-33, the final version was to be the VentureStar.

This was a high-risk program that integrated a lot of new technologies with the hopes of creating great new capability, namely single-stage to orbit and rapid, low-cost re-use, with a launch turn-around in the order of days. Lockheed got close, very close, but were ultimately thwarted by their own senior leadership who ignored their own engineers - repeatedly - and insisted on constructing fuel tanks that would never have worked. Not surprising, these fuel tanks failed in test. That leadership bungle ultimately cost them the program. The engineers came up with a stop-gap solution that would have worked, but by then Lockheed's relationship with NASA had soured, in part because they refused to pay for their own mismanagement, and they kept insisting on more money. Ultimately this led a former NASA director, Ivan Bekey, to testify before congress (emphasis mine):

What I would recommend is that NASA and Lockheed Martin face up to the risks inherent in an experimental flight program and renegotiate the X-33 cooperative agreement so as to delay the flight milestone until a replacement composite tank can be confidently flown.

Both NASA and Lockheed Martin should make the investments required to build another composite tank and to absorb the program costs of the delay, because only then will the X-33 program be able to meet its objectives

Lockheed refused to invest anything in the program and insisted that congress cough up everything to construct a new, proper set of tanks. Congress declined, the program was cancelled. Four years later Northrop Grumman demonstrated the composite tank technology needed to complete the X-33, and ultimately the VentureStar. But neither congress or Lockheed showed any interest in reviving the X-33 program. As a result, the United States abdicated it's manned space program to the Russians, a sad state of affairs that remains to this day.

If you read between the lines of Ivan Bekey's testimony before congress, only a small fragment shown above, you can see the seeds for a new type of development mentality in NASA taking root - instead of the hour-billing cost-plus bureaucratic boondoggle exemplified by Lockheed Martin and the X-33 (a situation that exists to this day, see the Orion Capsule), something resembling a market driven commercial enterprise.was needed. Ivan Bekey's testimony contributed to the death of the X-33/VentureStar, but it laid the foundation of NASA's Commercial Crew Development Program, or CCDev.

The CCDev program is what created SpaceX - which was created from the ashes of Lockheed Martin's X-33/VentureStar failure. I'm not going to summarize SpaceX's accomplishments over the last 10 years - this audience should already be quite familiar with what they've been up to.

Now, in closing: linked above is the funding section for Lockheed Martin's Orion Capsule. Here are the highlights:

funding through completion of development by 2023, is $20.4 billion (nominal).

and

There are no NASA estimates for the Orion program recurring yearly costs once operational, for a certain flight rat