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Space Moon NASA Technology

Lockheed Martin Unveils Plans For Huge Reusable Moon Lander For Astronauts (space.com) 74

Posted by BeauHD from the coming-soon-to-a-moon-base-near-you dept.
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.
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Lockheed Martin Unveils Plans For Huge Reusable Moon Lander For Astronauts More

Lockheed Martin Unveils Plans For Huge Reusable Moon Lander For Astronauts

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  • Great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by michelcolman ( 1208008 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @03:11AM (#57422988)

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

    • All that juicy delicious pork will be very useful on the moon also....

    • Even if SpaceX was well advanced in preparation they would be hard pushed to have any sort of sizable moonbase by late 2020's, maybe late 2030's or 40's
    • SpaceX wouldn't bother with the Moon. Elon is obsessed with Mars.

      • Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)

        by phayes ( 202222 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:04AM (#57423450) Homepage

        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 [wikipedia.org], NOT pork festivals like SLS & Orion, or Nasa micromanaging Space-X like they have been doing on Crewed.

      • Their plans are changing quite often. Last I heard, they would first try landing on the moon before going to Mars. Much easier, and makes a lot of sense to make sure everything is working properly.

        • How is it easier or make more sense to have astronauts die on the Moon, rather than Mars? 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. If a design flaw has been made, there's no way we will be sending a rescue craft to the Moon.

          The only difference between having a human land on the Moon rather than Mars is that Mars has a slightly stronger gravity well, a spar

          • Except that it is a much closer proving ground that doesn't take 8 minutes just to get a radio wave to.

            Crawl, then walk, then run. It's not like we have a warehouse of Apollo LMs laying around that we can dust off and learn to fly again. It's worthwhile to shake the bugs out in more favorable conditions.

          • Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @10:31AM (#57424518)

            > 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.

            • ripe for mining

              Which minerals are on the Moon, and at what kind of concentrations ?

              • Water and rock, for starters. Water for synthesizing fuel, rather than having to haul it up from Earth, and rock for radiation shielding for low-acceleration orbital structures.

                (Shielding quality is almost entirely based on mass, with only very minor fluctuation based on density. And in general, higher density shielding like lead is actually less desirable in space due to the more dangerous radioactive particle cascades created when atoms are shattered by cosmic ray collisions.)

                There should be most other

          • When the first people go to Mars, they are committing themselves to staying there for at least a few years. You can't take enough fuel for a round trip. If anything happens to your life support systems, you're pretty much fucked. And you can forget about planting potatoes.

            With the moon, you can go there, test all the long term life support systems, and hop back into the rocket if it doesn't work. Very big difference. Backup systems normally work at least for a few days.

            And why wouldn't we be able to send re

          • 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 shi

            • 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.

              More to the point, going and staying for a while. Flags and bootprints a second time is definitely useless. Flags, bootprints, and a place to live are considerably more useful. That requires solving new engineering problems.

          • Nah.

            Baby steps.

            Proof of concept.

            Beta testing.

            We have a goddam test site three days away.

            It would take that long to to get a presidential text message to fucking Mars.

      • Except for the announcement last week where they are sending people into lunar orbit in a couple years?

        • A free return trajectory around the Moon doesn't require anything that SpaceX wasn't planning on building anyway. Just launch the BFS, aim it at the right direction, and wait for it to come back to Earth.

          • To be fair, neither does landing on the moon. Orbital refueling is already required for leaving Earth orbit, it already has landing legs, and the Moon's gravity well is shallow enough that the BFS probably wouldn't be coming in much faster than after aerobraking through the thin Martian atmosphere.

            The only possible necessary addition would be constructing a landing pad on the Moon, if a sufficiently flat and smooth surface can't be found to skip that phase. It'd even give them a chance to practice landing

            • Is a single fuel tank big enough for Lunar orbit insertion, landing and taking off ?

              • That was the plan for last year's BFS design. It completely refuels in a highly elliptical Earth orbit, then goes to the moon, lands, takes off, and returns to Earth with a "substantial payload" using that one tank. I think it was with a much lower payload than just to Earth orbit, but even if it's ten or twenty tons instead of a hundred, that's still a lot of supplies and equipment that you can deliver with each landing.

              • Mars would require refueling on the surface to return to Earth, but the Moon has a substantially shallower gravity well, and you don't need to build up much additional speed to reach Earth in a timely fashion (in fact, I want to say that getting back to Earth actually takes less than full lunar escape velocity).

                As a rough estimate, Mars has under 1/2 the escape velocity (1/4 the energy) as Earth. And the Moon has under 1/2 the escape velocity of Mars. (Actual values: Earth = 11.2km/s, Mars=5.03km/s, Moon=

    • Needing ~40tons of fuel to carry four people - and a ton of cargo - out of [a shallow gravity well]... it might as well just stay there.

      Perhaps Elon's people will be able to decorate it with Christmas lights.

  • Those lying bastards

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Still 20-50 years away, like they told you.
      I'm sure they'll give you an update when they are getting closer.

  • Lockheed has made big promises before... (Score:5, Informative)

    by DanDD ( 1857066 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @06:42AM (#57423392)

    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 [wikipedia.org], the final version was to be the VentureStar [wikipedia.org].

    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 [nasaspaceflight.com] (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 [wikipedia.org]), 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 [wikipedia.org].

    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... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @11:25AM (#57424840) Homepage

      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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]), then thermonuclear weapons, created a siege mentality in Washington. When the Soviets developed working ICBMs [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org] 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

      • Also, with cost-plus contracting, you can hope to delay the project far enough that the next administration will cancel it, meaning that you never have to show an actual finished product, which means that nobody will ever blame you for something that doesn't work. Instead, everybody will walk away remembering you did such a great job.

    • This is no different than auto manufacturers jumping on the 'self driving car' bandwagon: it doesn't matter if the 'technology' is really, actually nowhere near ready for general use, they're getting in 'on the ground floor', as it were, so they're not left behind if it takes off. I'd imagine there's also an element of 'bluffing' the other potential competitors into announcing their own plans, to up the ante on the whole proposition; kind of like an auction, where someone bids on something they don't even w

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

      To put that in perspective, Elon Musk mentioned at a press conference a few weeks ago that the entire BFR and BFS program will cost between 2 to 10 billion USD at completion.

      I'm as much of a Lockheed fanboy as a SpaceX fanboy, but they are investing 20 billion taxpayer dollars just for the Orion capsule. That does not include the Delta rocket that will launch it.

  • Upgraded model Aries 1b to follow at a later time.

  • Sure I understand there may be quite a bit of it and oxidizing the hydrogen generates new water but I don't know how much of that will reach the surface again and when.

    I'd feel like if one wanna terrarform and shit one want to keep it?

    Then again I guess you could argue without being there that won't happen.

    Regardless we should had saved and not destroyed earth first.

    • No one's terraforming the moon... and pressurizing some caves doesn't count.

    • I feel your pain - while we can't terraform the Moon, we sill probably have thriving cities there eventually. But figure, fuel is going to be most of the mass of any major interplanetary vehicle, and any fuel we make on the Moon is fuel we don't need to launch from Earth, making our early steps into the solar system considerably cheaper.

      Meanwhile, launching supplies from Earth (or asteroids) is only going to keep getting cheaper for the foreseeable future - it won't be long in the grand scheme of things be

  • If this lander is to be reusable, Lockheed Martin will have to do all the maintenance and repair in lunar orbit or on the surface. For example, either they can remove the engines and overhaul them in zero gee and vacuum or they can build clean rooms on the surface. The only way to avoid this is to build engines that can last a multiple cycles without being worked on. Ditto for every part and system in the ship. Mind you if they pull this off, they could do all kinds of wonderful things.

  • ... the goddam F-35.

  • Oh, look! Another friggin' white paper on space vehicles! Give me a friggin' break. The old-guard aerospace companies will never build a damn thing. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and friends have been kicking their technological ass.

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