Lockheed Martin lands Orion
Multibillion contract will pay for lunar shuttle replacement
WASHINGTON -- NASA yesterday gave a multibillion dollar contract to build a manned lunar spaceship to Lockheed Martin Corp., the aerospace leader that usually builds unmanned rockets.
The space agency plans to use the reusable Orion crew exploration vehicle to replace the space shuttle fleet, take astronauts to the moon, and perhaps to Mars. Like Apollo and earlier spacecraft, it is perched atop a rocket.
The last time NASA awarded a manned spaceship contract to Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., was in 1996 for a space plane that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. NASA spent $912 million and the ship, called X-33, never got built because of technical problems.
Lockheed Martin built several unmanned probes, including the 1998 Lunar Prospector; 1976 Viking probes of Mars; Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which entered the red planet's orbit earlier this year; and the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed because of a mismatching of metric and English measurement units.
If all goes well, the first test flight of Orion will be September 2014 and astronauts could return to the moon by late 2019 or 2020, NASA estimates. 