About time. The current shuttle is like a Cuban car: built decades ago and held together with chewing gum, gaffers tape and cleverness.
Here’s the link to Lockheed’s site.
NASA gives $8.1 billion job to Lockheed
NASA has given a contract potentially worth $8.1 billion to Maryland`s Lockheed Martin Corp. to build a new generation of manned spacecraft.
The new spacecraft, called Orion, is to replace the space shuttle and eventually carry astronauts to the moon and maybe Mars, the space agency says.
Like Apollo and earlier spacecraft, Orion is to be perched on top of a rocket.
Lockheed beat a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. for the contract.
Before the announcement, analysts said the deal was the Boeing team`s to lose, The New York Times reported Friday. Lockheed usually builds unmanned rockets and has little experience with human spaceflight. By contrast, Boeing and Northrop built the space shuttles and Apollo vehicles.
The last time NASA awarded a manned spaceship contract to Lockheed was in 1996 for a space plane that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. NASA spent $912 million and plane was not built due to technical problems, the Times said.
Will it be able to conduct as many experiments as the shuttle?
I thought thats what the ISS was for.
Instead, NASA made the insanely complicated STS, threw away baskets full of money maintaining the monster kludge, and setting everything back years.
It must have been someones pet project. While the idea of a reusable spacecraft seem great, in practice it cost more then deposible systems. How NASA really fucked up was that all this time, there was no real viable replacement in the works. Sure there was the one piece pie wedge single stage craft, that never would have worked, but nothing practical was even considered. If not for Columbia, it would still be so.
22. That was the thing – it just never evidently occurred to them that making a launch system “reusable” would also make it so expensive to operate and maintain that it would make the whole “space truck” idea a joke. I remember when NASA was claiming that shuttle cargo costs would be roughly the equivalent of air freight.