NASA chose
the prime contractor Thursday for Orion, the shuttle successor that will
return astronauts to the Moon.
On Thursday,
NASA tapped
Lockheed Martin to build its capsule-based Orion vehicle, seen here with
circular solar arrays deployed in an artist’s interpretation of a flight to the
International Space
Station (ISS). Lockheed beat out the joint team of Northrop Grumman and
Boeing in the Orion competition.
Like NASA’s
current space shuttles, Orion vehicles are expected to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, but
are the core spacecraft for the agency’s Moon goals. The crew capsule will
carry four-astronaut teams to launch toward the Moon. A secondary cargo or
lunar lander carrier rocket will launch separately for Orion crews to dock with
before leaving low-Earth orbit.
The first
crewed Orion spacecraft is expected to launch by 2014, with the first Moon
landing by 2020.
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