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

Great

[michelcolman]

The late 2020s, they won't have to worry about uneven terrain then because they can just land at the SpaceX moon base.

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.

Re:Great

[TheRealQuestor]

It isn't the 90's anymore. Late 2020 is only a couple of years away.

you must have missed the important (s) it's not late 2020, it's late 2020s which means probably closer to 2030 which is still a pretty good stretch of time between now and then. Even at that timeline there is now way they could do it in 12 years as it takes them that long just to finalize drawings, let alone actually build and test it.

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.

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

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

Re:Why don't we have water powered cars?

[careysub]

In the same sense that we are talking about "water powered space ships" we do have water powered cars. The Toyota Mirai Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle is for sale right now. Hydrogen can be made by splitting water, and that is what they are talking about for fueling rockets on the Moon.

Mars vs Moon

[sjbe]

How is it easier or make more sense to have astronauts die on the Moon, rather than Mars?

Not really sure what you find confusing. It's a LOT easier to get astronauts to and from the moon alive. We already have life support systems that can deal with moon mission duration but not so much for Mars. Communications to the moon are a few seconds round trip. Mars communication averages around 27 minutes round trip. Regular resupply to the moon is feasible. Not so much to Mars. Rescue missions to the moon are feasible even if difficult. Far less so to Mars. We have no practical design for shielding against radiation on the trip to/from Mars or while there but that's not nearly as big an issue to/from/on the Moon. Landing on the moon is MUCH easier than on Mars because the martian atmosphere turns out to be a real pain - thick enough to be a hazard but too thin to be useful.

Neither place is a friendly warm place to visit but it's pretty obvious that the Moon is the easier trip of the two by a pretty wide margin if you care at all about bringing the astronauts back alive. I'd like to see us visit both but Mars is definitely the harder target of the two.

The only difference between having a human land on the Moon rather than Mars is that Mars has a slightly stronger gravity well, a sparse atmosphere, and it will take more time to send a manned craft to Mars rather than the Moon.

That is not even close to the only difference. That thin martian atmosphere is actually a huge problem for landing there. It's easier to land on Earth than on Mars because the atmosphere on Mars is thick enough to cause entry heating problems but too thin to provide much useful braking. And that time to get there is mostly time in deep space where radiation becomes a big problem for living beings if they aren't shielded and we currently have no practical shielding. That problem along with the substantial sum of money it would take to finance such a mission are the biggest hurdles to getting to Mars.

But humans have already landed on the Moon. There is nothing new to be learned engineering-wise by having a landing craft land on the Moon first.

Yes we've landed on the moon but claims that there is no more we can learn by going again are manifestly absurd. There is a ton of engineering and science we could learn by going again.

I have yet to read anyone who can explain how it will be safer or more rewarding to send humans back to the Moon.

The ways in which going to the Moon is safer are legion. Most of them have to do with the proximity to Earth and the advantages that affords. Frankly if we cannot handle a manned mission to the Moon, it's not at all clear how we would handle the more costly and challenging mission to Mars. That's not to say we shouldn't go to Mars but I think that particular journey is going to take a LOT longer to become a reality - predominately because of the life support systems we still have yet to develop.