Fully reusable crewed Martian lander was unveiled Friday by Lockheed Martin at this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
The water-powered lander, single stage and fully reusable, will allow humans to explore Mars from an orbiting ‘base camp’ in the 2030s.
The lander is Lockheed Martin’s vision for what may come after NASA’s Deep Space Gateway mission to test habitable orbital environments. The mission starts in the early 2020s. The completely reusable lander could both land and lift off, according to Robert Chambers, a senior systems engineer at the US defense giant Lockheed Martin, helping to lead the Mars Base Camp project.
Lockheed Martin, the aerospace and defense giant, is one of six U.S. companies that NASA has chosen to build prototypes for NextSTEP program. The other five companies under NASA contract to develop deep space habitats are Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, Sierra Nevada Space Systems, Orbital ATK, owned by Northrop Grumman, and Nano Racks.
NASA will start testing near the moon aiming to develop the infrastructure needed to send people to Mars.The lander has been built through the technology used for the construction of the existing Orion spacecraft and ‘will be able to both descend and ascend’. The vehicle will use cryogenic hydrogen as fuel because of the “water-based economy” anticipated on the Red Planet, where water can power both the orbital base camp and the lander.There is no further information whether NASA’s Deep Space Gateway mission will include landing on the moon. However, Lockheed Martin said its lander would also be capable of a lunar mission if required.
According to CNBC.
