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

[phayes]

If Nasa+Congress really wanted to go to the Moon, they would send Space-X (and others like BO ou even ULA) a shopping list of objectives*, ask them how much it would cost, let them do the work & them pay them as objectives are realized.

Objectives are things like the CRS Contract, NOT pork festivals like SLS & Orion, or Nasa micromanaging Space-X like they have been doing on Crewed.

Re:Great

[Immerman]

> If there is an engineering deficiency that will be fatal to astronauts, it won't make a difference whether they die on Mars or the Moon. It takes roughly 3 days to get from Earth to the Moon.

Ecological collapse springs to mind. Mars is too far away to live on fresh rations, water, oxygen, etc. shipped from Earth - that's all going to have to be recycled in place, via some combination of engineering and ecology. If that system breaks down, as it probably will at some point, being only the third time we've attempted it, and the first time we've done it off Earth, then you can ship more supplies to the Moon, or evacuate. If the same thing happens on Mars, they're dead - help is months away, and even if they have a ship standing by and enough fuel to get to Earth, the odds of an orbital alignment that takes less than several months for a return trip are slim.

Similarly, most moderate health crises requiring Earth-bound facilities to treat can be delayed three days to get back from the Moon, probably even 6+ if there's not a ship standing by on the Moon. But on Mars that becomes tragic PR.

> Returning Americans back to the Moon is a huge waste of time (and money)

I must disagree. The Moon is *right there* - the long-term orbital support services it can offer in terms of fuel, raw materials, industrial potential, etc. will all benefit Earth directly. Essentially it's one giant rocky asteroid already captured in Earth orbit and ripe for mining and development. Especially important since its mere existence makes it difficult to capture other asteroids into long-term stable Earth orbits. And living in such a deep gravity well, we need all the help we can get.

Mars is the one that will be a "waste" of money - it has much better long-term potential to become a fully self-sufficient colony, and likely a supply depot for developing the asteroid belt and beyond, but it has basically nothing to offer Earth except science. And that science will be best served if we wait to go there in person until we're ready to seriously explore its potential ecosystem without contaminating it with our early flailing around trying to survive.

Re:Lockheed has made big promises before...

[thomst]

That's all excellent background information on Lockheed's track record on actually delivering on their promises - and it's utterly unsurprising.

Lockheed is, first and foremost, a defense contractor. Its corporate culture directly reflects that fact - which is why it insists on being paid to do anything and everything any project requires, very much including fixing its own design and production blunders.

In the defense contracting world, every contract is made on a cost-plus reimbursement basis. Essentially, that means the federal government is required to pay the full cost for all materials, labor, and services the contractor employs to fulfill it, plus a fixed percentage of those expenses (usually 15%) as the contractor's profit.

Of course, no private corporation or entity would agree to such a contract, absent a literal gun to its head, because cost-plus amounts to an open invitation to the contractor to inflate its costs as much as possible. Worse still, it's a rare cost-plus deal, indeed, that includes any meaningful penalties for cost overruns - regardless of how large they might be - or for late delivery of the contracted-for product. (Which means all the incentives are for the contractor to over-promise and under-deliver to the maximum extent possible, and none of them reward the contractor for delivering on time and under budget.)

This determinedly-counterproductive contracting model is a heritage of WWII, when the defense industry couldn't dependably predict in advance what its total costs for a given contract would be, because it couldn't rely on the cost - or availability - of raw materials to remain stable for the life of a contract, and the supply of dependable, qualified employees was equally problematic. It proved so lucrative, that once that war ended, the defense industry insisted on maintaining the cost-plus model - and, since the military paid zero attention to costs (the money to pay contractors didn't come out of its operating budget, so, again, it had no incentive to care), and Congress also didn't care (because the defense industry was always extremely generous to legislators, not just in campaign contributions, but in paying for luxurious "junkets" to country clubs for conferences that always happened to include lots of free hookers and high-quality booze), neither objected to continuing the practice.

In their defense, it was the beginning of the Cold War era, and the USSR's acquisition first of nuclear weapons technology (principally from the Rosenberg/Greenglass spy ring), then thermonuclear weapons, created a siege mentality in Washington. When the Soviets developed working ICBMs, that pervasive fear ratcheted up to 11, then blew the knob off the amp.

Since there was a mere handful of defense firms capable of designing and building heavy launch vehicles, there weren't a lot of alternative sources to which the feds could turn, so the status remained quo for well over half a century, and Congress basically accepted being hostage to the industry giants as inevitable - even desirable.

Enter SpaceX.

After Musk's rocket company successfully launched its first booster, the Falcon 1, into orbit in 2009, then orbited a satellite for its first commercial custormer, NASA became convinced that it had the expertise, the resources, and the will to compete with Lockheed in the launch vehicle market - at least to the extent that it agreed to let SpaceX attempt to send a half-dozen resupply missions to the ISS. The absolutely key thing about that contract was that it was not made on a cost-plus basis. Instead, SpaceX would get paid only if it succeeded in launching supply missions to the ISS, and, moreover, it would only be paid on a per-mission basis (which is to say t