Returning Astronauts to the Moon: Lockheed Martin Finalizes Full-Scale Cislunar Habitat Prototype
Personnel test the deep space habitat prototype. (Credit: Lockheed Martin)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Lockheed Martin PR) — For long-duration, deep space missions, astronauts will need a highly efficient and reconfigurable space, and Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) is researching and designing ways to support those missions.
Under a public-private partnership as a part of NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Phase II study contract, Lockheed Martin has completed the initial ground prototype for a cislunar habitat that would be compatible with NASA’s Gateway architecture. This habitat will help NASA study and assess the critical capabilities needed to build a sustainable presence around the Moon and support pioneering human exploration in deep space.
The full-scale prototype, or Habitat Ground Test Article (HGTA), is built inside of a repurposed shuttle-era cargo container, called a Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), at Kennedy Space Center. Using rapid prototyping and modern design tools like virtual and augmented reality, the team customized the interior making full use of the entire volume of the module to accommodate a variety of tasks like science missions and personal needs of future astronauts. The team also studied how to apply the advanced, deep space capabilities that are already built in to NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Through additional research and development funding, the NextSTEP team also applied mixed-reality technology to further refine the concept.
Deep space habitat prototype. (Credit: Lockheed Martin)
“Throughout the design and engineering process of this high-fidelity prototype, we have kept the diversity of missions top-of-mind,” said Bill Pratt, Lockheed Martin Space NextSTEP program manager. “By building modularity in from the beginning, our design can support Lunar orbit and surface science missions along with commercial operations, all while accelerating the path to the Moon.”
Over the past five months, the team used tools like virtual and augmented reality to simplify and streamline the build-up process. They also applied expertise from Lockheed Martin’s heritage of operating autonomous interplanetary robotic missions, like OSIRIS-REx and InSight, to integrate reliable robotic capabilities in to the design.
“Getting back to the Moon, and eventually Mars, is no small feat, but our team are mission visionaries,” said Pratt. “They have worked to apply lessons learned from our experience with deep space robotic missions to this first-of-its-kind spacecraft around the Moon.”
The Lockheed Martin team will soon transition the prototype to the NASA NextSTEP team for assessment. During the week of March 25, a team of NASA astronauts will live and work inside the prototype, evaluating the layout and providing feedback. The NASA test team will also validate the overall design and will be able to evaluate the standards and common interfaces, like the International Docking System Standard (IDSS), and how to apply those systems for long-term missions based at the Lunar Gateway. Once NASA testing has completed, Lockheed Martin will continue to optimize and study the prototype to prepare for other Lunar efforts.
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About Lockheed Martin
Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 105,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.
52 responses to “Returning Astronauts to the Moon: Lockheed Martin Finalizes Full-Scale Cislunar Habitat Prototype”
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They’ve made that interior look exactly like what their customer (NASA) would buy – great job!
On the other hand, yikes! We’ve gotta get some interior designers in here for future projects. If everything in the space is gonna look like strange hallways from the movie 2001, no tourist is ever gonna want to go to space!
Actually, as long as it doesn’t look like the dark hallways with grates on the floor and ceiling like the Alien movies, it works for me. Any habitat that will be in space for years needs some sort of modular design for the interior, so it can be easily reconfigured, and obsolete parts swapped with newer models.
There’s a certain escapism to space, and we could just double down on that and make it an escape ROOM. Horror space tourism at its finest!
I’d go specifically for the 2001 aesthetic personally, still looks sleek as anything 50 years since release. Just need to throw in some bright red Djinn chairs to complete the look.
Needs some house plants, a splash of color (avalado green appliances, perhaps), a “water feature” of some sort (ideally, a salt water aquarium), and a large view port that would of course be the centerpiece of the room (the Cupola from the ISS would be perfect — I mean, we’re orbiting the friggin’ moon here; you gotta have a nice window. You just gotta).
Lighting — fully deck it out with the whole Phillips Hue Smart Lighting package
Are you INTENTIONALLY going for a Fallout aesthestic?
“Dome, sweet dome.”
Actual avocado green is a good color, but the disco-era appliances of yore all used a shade with way too much black mixed in – closer to olive drab than actual avocado. Personally, though, I prefer that sort of custardy, butterscotchy yellow shade that ran a distant second to “avocado” green back when Saturday Night Fever was still big. Oh well, “leisure suit” colors of that day were hideous too.
Oh, you mean like when someone pukes all over the cockpit? My parents avocado green Plymouth Duster comes to mind, or my grandmother’s avocado green refrigerator, and of course the green ghosts from the green phosphor on our first color TV. That and 70’s orange need to make a comeback …. not.
My Skylane (actually use to be my parents) is avocado green. just slight touch ups of the paint it had when it was built in 63
Phooo! That’s OF ERA. The dormitory carpeting on Kitt Peak is that tight weave avocado green, along with some of those great parabolic and hyperbolic lamp shades.
My Grandfathers post WW2 pickup is purple 🙂 still running Dodges rock
That was just when the color selection expanded from black to black and green. I have a friend who’s into WWII era big machine tools. They still sport their War Production Board plates. Nothing below 4000 lbs will do. You could make Sherman tanks in his shop, but he drove a jacked up 2.5 ton Studebaker for years with expired plates and no insurance. He figured the shock value alone would keep cop’s eyes off the license plate and on the truck. It worked. That truck was immortal. He sold it in 2008.
I worked for awhile with a Cincinnati Horizontal mill of WW2 provenance – manufactured in 1942. Well-worn, but still serviceable. Given reasonable care, most machine tools can easily outlive their builders/users.
As have I and a 36″ stroke Cincinnati shaper. All I can say is it was no accident of history that the sons of machinists who worked and mastered those machines made a very hard form of music and called it Heavy Metal. Plowing through hard steel and making blue chips, and smoke all the while controlling the outcome to +/- 0.0005″ is truly a life changing experience, and one of my favourite experiences from the 20th cen.
My small 9″ SouthBend 9A is from WWII, as is my surface grinder, and pexto shear. They work perfectly to original design specifications. They’re only temporarily mine, just as my grandfathers generation gave them to me, I’ll hand them down to someone who will use and care for them as the relics they are.
Nice. I’m envious. I think the last shaper I used was also a Cincinnati, though its stroke was only a foot or so. It was also of WW2 vintage, but that was in high school shop back in ’66 so the vintage was far less impressive at the time. Ditto the South Bend lathes of which my high school shop had, I believe, six.
I would like to think all those WW2-vintage machine tools are still around somewhere, slathered in Cosmoline, awaiting a recall to service, even if only recreational. Alas, I suspect most have long since become razor blades. The education establishment, as it became a left-wing bastion, slowly squeezed out high school shop classes. Everyone should go to college. No one should aspire to a life as a proletarian factory rat. The Party has spoken. High school shop is all but extinct now.
Good news, shop is back. all the public high schools in Tucson have machine shops, auto garages, and wood shops. And it’s the lefty’s who brought them back. Righties with power think that’s labor for Chinamen. My friends with kids in Maryland also had public schools with full shop options as well as construction courses and summer construction internships. Again, it was the lefty’s who re-started these programs. For my generation your complaints were correct. But what really killed shop in Tucson was insurance premiums, I knew teachers in the early 90’s when those programs were shut down as the legislature (Republican) started their slaughter of the education budget that lowered Arizona schools from top tier to being right at the bottom with Mississippi. The folks who know how to keep manufacturing in country with full health coverage and a solid middle class are to be seen in Germany. We should be taking some serious notes from them as there’s a lot of 3rd world cheap labor backed by government labor out there for American investors to fall in love with.
What has killed education is not pinch-penny Republicans but lefty teacher’s unions. In CA, where the mostly leftist tech aristocracy is very influential, I don’t know of a single high school, public or private, that has any shop classes. Maybe we could trade some of your lefties for some of ours.
To the extent lefties are interested in binging things like shop classes back it’s probably as a way to appeal to Hispanics, who are disproportionately employed in blue collar skilled trades. The long-time lefty disdain for manual labor doesn’t play too well among people who actually do it, so this is probably just another example of lefties pandering to a potential voting bloc, however insincerely. I’d be willing to bet the enrollment of sons and daughters of the Arizona lefty establishment in shop classes is effectively zero.
Nor will emulating the Germans save us. For one thing, the German population is cratering far faster than our own. One can keep unsustainable labor laws and such in force as one slides down the slippery slope to demographic oblivion, but not if one wishes to endure. In any event, European, including German, off-shoring to the U.S. – to take advantage of all that cheap coolie U.S. labor – will probably keep enough Americans employed to tide us over until wages in China and even Sub-Saharan Africa rise enough to make U.S. workers competitive again once productivity is taken into account.
You should take a look before you paint with such a wide brush. That hispanic must be descended from illegal Amish immigrants from Mexico. And, that kid needs to tuck his pony tail into the back of his shirt.
BTW the government sells blue chip machine tools from the strategic reserve unused in cosmoline from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They’re the machines the gov intends to reconstitute the economy after a nuclear war. I saw a sale of some of these machines as recent as 5 or so years ago. They go for cheap money now as there are very few hand crank machinists and the productivity of CNC is the only thing that can keep a shop alive.
Interesting. Sadly, I have no place to put any machine tools these days.
And, yes, CNC has taken over for a reason. Hand-crank machining has gone the way of watchmaking in the digital era and for much the same reason. CAE software has, in turn, put the “parts programmers” of the early NC and CNC era largely out to pasture. These skills now survive mostly as hobbies. Another decade or two and that will also be true of driving motor vehicles and flying airplanes.
There was a time when horsemanship was pretty important too. So it goes.
Don’t know that one – and I was quite the car nut in ’63. Is it some one-off custom job that’s half Buick Skylark and half Ford Fairlane?
Beam me up, Scotty!
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Yes!! 😀
Yes. Even nuclear submarines are homey and warm compared to old-school space habs. I suspect the “architect’s” resume is heavy with hospital work.
One also has to be horrified/amused by the repurposing of an MPLM as the basis for this spam can. The Shuttles have been gone eight years now, but if Lock-Mart gets its way, the limitations of their cargo bays will live on indefinitely. Welcome to the future – just like the past.
Where’s Bigelow?
Bigelow also has a NextSTEP contract. Sadly, Bigelow has traditionally lacked even Lockheed-Martin’s “gift” for PR, never mind SpaceX’s.
Man, this thing is small. This is where the expandable modules need to start coming in, especially if Gateway is to be a precursor to a Deep Space Transport.
If you’re not gonna rotate it, at least inflate it
Reminder that these habs are meant to be like 10-15 tons tops even the inflatables will be small.
But, not this small. We can do better now, so let’s go ahead and do better.
And maybe we will — this is after all just one of a number of NextSTEP proposals. Sierra Nevada is proposing a partial inflatable, irrc, while Bigelow of course has one of its inflatables proposed.
Interestingly, NASA has been showing a partially inflatable module in its notional Gateway architecture for a while now
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
You make some good points but consider Northrop’s (formerly Orbital ATK’s) offering. It shares a lot of commonality with thier logistics craft which would not only be a cost saver due to economies of scale, but also it would be easy to produce more habitats of the same proven design years later because logistic work keeps the production line warm whereas an expandable from Bigelow or SNC would basically be a one off without a commitment to regularly build new stations and replace modules.
I agree that that one (basically, Cygnus) kind of sticks out as being readily plug-in-able. And NASA has previously expressed interest in developing further uses for Cygnus.
Then there’s Boeing, who has the ISS module experience. It’ll be interesting to see who wins
Here’s some NASA concept art from back when they announced the 6 companies who would submit NextSTEP habitat proposals: https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
If I did have to pick an expandable though I’d lean towards SNC as there are more diversified in the work they do whereas bigelow while haveing a head start in that they’ve actually demo’d expandables on orbit is kinda a one trick pony that will need to be supported, or bought out. So yeah the results will be interesting…
Cygnus has been “practicing ” adapting to a lot of roles…
The interesting possibility with SNC, is that they they could break apart the Tug/ECLSS. At this time, it is 1 unit. But, they are looking at various ideas still.
If they break it apart, it would enable them to put multiple eclss unit on there, and then have back-up as well as the ability to hold more ppl if need be.
With others, they are too tightly integrated.
They re-used an existing MPLM module. It was designed to fit inside the shuttle cargo bay. It can certainly be stretched, but remember that this is just one module out of many. I also look at the current ISS, and how much stuff is mounted to the exterior of each module. I don’t see how that happens with an inflatable module. If you just want to float around in space, inflatables are fine, but you need a rigid core to mount things to.
Ya know, I wonder about rigidity. Like, would having an inflatable in the middle be bouncing the station around in relation to each docking and undocking?
In thinking about that, a solution (if that’s even a problem) could be to have some bars running along the outside of the inflatable, parallel to to the axis of the Gateway, basically kind of like an ISS truss section, to provide an “exoskeleton” to the inflatable. That way, you’d get the inflatable’s greater internal volume beyond what would otherwise even possible due to the normally limiting fairing diameter of the launch vehicle, but keep the rigidity of a “can’-type module. Meanwhile, to your point, you could hang stuff on/off the exoskeleton, have tracks for a mobile robot arm, etc. Just an idea.
Anyway, it seems inflatables have certain advantages (volume and greater MMOD protection, for two) and thus a role to play going forward, but they need mission heritage to really be in NASA’s toolkit. The Gateway, with its NRHO, is, as we all know, at least argueably more of a tollbooth than a gateway to the moon. If they’re gonna build the Gateway anyway, let’s get some technology development out of it. NASA’s been working on these inflatables at least since TransHab back in the 90s. Among a lot of other technologies that have been worked on, largely unrealized, for decades now by NASA, I’d like to see an inflatable incorporated in their lunar plans for the 20s
not needed. That inflatable is suppose to turn somewhat solid once inflated.
Besides, they moved from an exoskeleton to an endoskeleton with that center structure. In addition, it keeps all of the components safe.
Not there.
As always it looks too clean and orderly, ISS in mind.
They are really pushing the Lunar Tollbooth aren’t they?
Mars Tollbooth. It is just near the Moon.
Either way SpaceX will just ignore it…
wow how much studying did this take to look just like ISS
It should look like this https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
How about this?
This is more my style.
https://digilander.libero.i…
They got their grandkids hair style down…..
Okay, I’m with ya. What’s that from, btw?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Nice!
The picture is a still from the 1960s British tv series ‘UFO’. It shows the control room of their moon base. Episodes can be found on YouTube.