Lockheed Martin Wins NASA Moon Contract

[wakeme2008]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Moon-Rocket-Contract.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

August 31, 2006
Lockheed Martin Wins NASA Moon Contract
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 4:20 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- NASA on Thursday awarded a multibillion dollar contract to build a manned lunar spaceship to Lockheed Martin Corp., which usually builds rockets without people.

The last time NASA awarded a manned spaceship contract to Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., was in 1996 for a spaceplane that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. NASA spent $912 million and the ship, called X-33, never got built because of technical problem

..one more para at link...

No surprise here.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. "never got built because of technical problem(s)"

Those technical problems being that the X-33 was "built" out of hypothetical materials that don't exist and probably never will.

[acmejack]

2. X-33 = Dynasoar?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

3. didn't that have to do with certain engine components?

I thought that we had some interesting breakthroughs with ramjet technology.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. Fuel tank, mostly.

The original design called for this crazy lightweight fuel tank made out of materials that don't exist. Then they built a fuel tank prototype out of materials that do exist, and lo and behold, the thing was way too heavy and aerodynamically unsound.

[brentspeak]

4. What happened to going for Mars?

Moon's been done already.

[Lerkfish]

6. because a Lunar base can fire weapon lasers at earth with impunity

a mars base could not.

otherwise I see no reason for THIS neocon administration to invest in a lunar colony

[Dudley_DUright]

7. I sure as hell can't think of a legitimate scientific reason to return

to the moon. In fact, planning to do so is starving funds from NASA's space science missions.

[Lerkfish]

8. right. Imagine if Halliburton owned and operated a laser cannon from

the moon: the same side of the moon always faces the earth, and at some point in a day or two it has straight line access to all sides of the earth.
then we wouldn't even have to bother with pesky soveriegn nations. There's your "american global leadership" in a nutshell. Becoming the biggest terrorists in history.

[Ghost Dog]

13. This is the raison d'être of the Space Command,

I believe.

http://www.afspc.af.mil/

[Psephos]

15. lol, you had me going there for a moment

next time don't forget the "sarcasm" smiley

:-)

[Lerkfish]

17. I wasn't being sarcastic.

the PNAC want to militarize space. If they want to go to the moon, its because there is a military application for doing so. Yes, I"m speculating on what that application would be, but there's no way in hell the neocons simply want to collect moonrocks.

[sofa king]

12. From an engineering point of view it makes sense.

If you really want to go to Mars, the Moon is a logical first step. First, it's much closer. Second, the Moon and Mars share similar conditions (temperature extremes, vacuum and near-vacuum, dust that gets into everything) which allow for comprehensive testing. Third, the Moon may be able to supply certain raw materials (people are hoping for water, but I'm thinking more along the lines of reaction mass like cesium) more cheaply than it costs to launch them from Earth. Fourth, a manned Mars mission might be more safely assembled and launched from lunar orbit.

That last point requires some explanation. A nuclear rocket might be the best way to actually get humans to Mars. If the reactor could be sent into lunar orbit in pieces and assembled there, then there is no danger that the reactor might someday crash on Earth. Lunar orbit is already 99% of the way to Mars, in terms of the energy which must be expended, so much less fuel is needed (this is because Earth is the most massive rock in the solar system, and most of the energy needed to get anywhere else is expended just getting into Earth orbit).

If we build an infrastructure that can safely and regularly get humans to the moon and back, the rest of the solar system is literally at our fingertips, because once the problems of surviving on the moon are met and overcome, the rest of the solar system doesn't change all that much, and once you're at lunar orbit the energy required to get anywhere else (slowly) is comparatively minimal.

But I think your observation is still correct, Dudley: none of the above is "pure" science. It's engineering science, materials science, and other applied sciences. I would very much like to see NASA's space science division split off entirely from the manned space program, so that the two can work in parallel without competing against each other. The benefits of space science are obvious--arguably, we wouldn't know about global warming were it not for the satellites which monitor the Earth itself.

But manned space flight provides other, sometimes difficult to identify benefits. Placing that research in the public domain, rather than under wraps like DoD research invariably is, gives everyone the opportunity to apply those advances to other things. If the precursors of Kevlar had stayed only in ICBMs instead of being used in the Apollo program, you wouldn't be skiing on it today.

It also provides an attractive political opportunity, should we ever get our country back. A thriving space program might just provide a funding alternative for defense contractors such as Lockheed, which might in turn reduce the pressure to expend more and more money on defense systems and on spurious wars. Raytheon will destroy this country before we ever destroy Raytheon, so maybe we ought to be channeling their efforts into less destructive venues, and exploration has always been the gentle hand of war.

[Psephos]

14. Thoughtful post n/t

[Vidar]

16. Thanks for your insight on the subject.

[Uncle Joe]

18. Excellent post sofa king. n/t

[Occulus]

19. Well, there are a few good reasons

A lunar-based telescope array, for example. Testing the viability of a colony on the nearest harsh body accessible to us is another. I think we damn well better try a Moon base if we're going to eventually try a colony on another planet.

I'm sure other, more astute DUers could come up with better examples, but those are two I can think of off the top of my head.

Why aren't we prospecting in the asteroid belt?

[Qutzupalotl]

9. Google "Bush Moon"

That was a popular protest sign in 2003.

Before Bush launched the initiative to return to the moon, you'd get nothing but hits about the connections between Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Bush family.

Now, you still get a few, but the waters are muddied with the Bush lunar program.

I'm not saying Karl Rove is making us go to the moon, but he was in charge of policy at the time this was announced. It sounds like a way to squelch that line of criticism of the Bush family.

[Charlie Brown]

11. Bush wants to build his "Death Star" nt

[heliarc]

22. As David Cross said...

Why are we concentrating on putting a man on the moon...

Let's put a man in an apartment!

[cyberpj]

10. Lockheed Martin at Top of this Top Ten of Top 200 Federal Contractors

Top 200 Federal Contractors
Total Purchases: $388,017,686,748

Ths list shows rank, how much they got, what amt to military and how much to civilian.

Top 10 below (ugly format, the web site is a nice table)

Rank Parent Company Total $ DoD $ Civilian $ DoD Rank Civil. Rank

1 Lockheed Martin Corp. $26,312,273,206 $20,016,273,528 $6,295,999,676 1 1
2 Boeing Co. 21,347,810,866 18,890,249,207 2,457,561,658 2 5
3 Northrop Grumman Corp. 15,632,683,034 13,742,026,915 1,890,656,119 3 7
4 General Dynamics Corp. 11,527,395,499 11,182,583,664 344,811,834 4 38
5 Raytheon Co. 9,953,128,166 9,444,816,263 508,311,901 5 23
6 Halliburton Co. 6,099,064,859 5,956,162,998 142,901,860 6 84
7 L-3 Communications Holdings 5,341,120,624 4,849,615,503 491,505,120 8 25
8 United Technologies Corp. 5,106,722,268 4,958,962,192 147,760,076 7 80
9 SAIC 4,779,067,074 2,788,583,917 1,990,483,157 10 6
10 Bechtel Group Inc. 4,639,268,807 1,556,699,544 3,082,569,262 20 4

http://www.govexec.com/features/0806-15/0806-15s2s1.htm

on edit: add this shout out to DU's The Straight Story for the info.

[htuttle]

20. "Heute die welt, morgen das sonnensystem!"

[high density]

21. I used to like NASA...

But now I feel it's just another handout to defense contractors. There's too much "spreading of the wealth" to private companies that already have plenty of business.