The winner of contract to build the next lunar spacecraft will be announced this afternoon. The project is now called Orion, but many in the industry still know it as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV. Regarding the contract:
Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Northrop Grumman Corp., maker of the vehicle that landed a man on the moon 37 years ago, may beat out Lockheed Martin Corp. for a $4.5 billion contract to build the next lunar spacecraft.The new vehicle, called Orion, is the centerpiece of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's $122 billion effort to return to the moon as early as 2018. Northrop is the leading contender for the award to be announced today, analysts including J.P. Morgan Securities Inc.'s Joseph Nadol said.
Not only is the contract worth a lot of money, but the project itself should be very exciting. One of the most interesting features of the announcement is that NASA has been so good at keeping the secret, after telling Congress who they selected over a month ago.
"Northrop Grumman Corp., maker of the vehicle that landed a man on the moon 37 years ago..."
I thought most of that hardware was made by North American / Rockwell, which of course has since been bought by Boeing. But Boeing is cooperating with Northrop on this proposal, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from. Then again, in aerospace, everyone ends up building pieces of everything anyways, so who cares ;] (Of course, I care!)
I could be wrong, but I think the CEV is just the manned orbital module, with "Orion" referring to the whole system of launch vehicles, cargo vehicles, manned modules, landers, ground equipment, and so on and so forth.
(And Michael, I don't know if you saw/heard, but that big model spaceplane that used to be mounted on the top corner of the building where you used to work in El Segundo (kinda hanging over the models of the B-2 and Global Hawk and SuperHornet, across the way from the YF-23) has been replaced by a model CEV. I wonder what they'll do if they lose the contract... Replace that by a model of Lockheed's CEV? Well, they have a SuperHornet among the models, so I guess if they're making a large subsection or something, that's enough to get a display model, even if they are not the primary contractor for the design... Then again, Northrop did design the F-17 on which the SuperHornet is based...)
Speaking of which, time to go to work...
Lockheed won, according to Drudge.
Oh well. Can't win'em all.
My sincere congrats to the Lockheed folks, who must have put together one heck of a proposal, in order to have beat the Northrop-Boeing one.