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    Lockheed Martin offers to rescue Mars mission from budget death
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    Lockheed Martin offers to rescue Mars mission from budget death

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    10 Comments

    1. Foss44 on

      …For a price.

      People should not confuse a money grab for scientific charity.

    3. OldWrangler9033 on

      So didn’t Rocket Lab, for cheaper than big legacy company could provide. Yet, budget slashers could care less. As long a Big Beautiful Bill delivers it’s goods to whomever…

    4. OlympusMons94 on

      >The mission’s first phase is already underway, with NASA’s Perseverance rover exploring the surface of Mars. As it traverses the dunes and dead river beds that last saw water two billion years ago, it’s been collecting drilling samples that have been sealed in special container tubes left behind on the ground like a paper trail in a cosmic game of Hares & Hounds.

      At best that badly misrepresents what is being done. Perseverance takes a pair of samples from each selected target. One of the tubes is kept onboard the rover. The second is later dropped with other samples at one of a small numbsr of cache locations, serving as a backup to those kept on the rover.

      >The idea is that a second lander will eventually set down in the vicinity of the first and deploy a second rover that will follow the path blazed by the nuclear-powered Perseverance and collect the tubes.

      The plan to use a second “fetch” rover was scrapped years ago. The succeeding plan is for Perseverance to deliver its stored onboard samples to the sample return lander.

    5. EnterpriseGate on

      Let them.  They are offering to complete the mission for $3 billion fixed price contract.  
      A plan for a moonbase then to launch to Mars from the moon.  
      Even if stage 1 is successful we get a moonbase.  

      They plant to use what they learned with the insight Mars lander that they built and successfully landed on Mars.  It was active on Mars for 4 years. For $380 million.  Only ended because dust on the solar panels. 
      They reused the Mars phoenix lander engineering from 2008 to save costs.    
      They launched with an Atlas V and not spacex.  

      Lockheed is owned by a huge mix of investors who do not want bankruptcy.  
      Like 25 different investment groups own it.  There is no real controlling owner. 
      Top 30% is these 3 = state street corp 15%, vanguard group 9%  backrock 7.5%.  

      This is our best chance and we need to take it while avoiding political spacex.  

      We would be stupid to not take this deal as they work closely with JPL and Nasa.  

    7. the_fungible_man on

      >All very Heath Robinson-like…

      Had to look up Mr. Robinson to decipher the meaning. Now if they’d said Rube Goldberg-like…

    8. c3ramics on

      Lockheed, who’s just made a killing selling AGM-114 Hellfire missiles is included in the projected $30-50 billion in profits for US companies for the Gaza cleansing in 2025. This is a fraction of their gains, and they’re doing their best to save public image. Save a Mars program, for a fraction of the price, with losses they can take? Marketing move.

    9. BoneDocHammerTime on

      privatization of public industry/goods/services is the republiscum way.

    10. LordRabican on

      [Rocket Lab’s Proposal](https://rocketlabcorp.com/missions/mars-sample-return/)

      Rocket Lab’s proposal was by far the most cost effective solution during the initial call for proposals and it is technically feasible right now with their existing rockets, spacecraft, and end-to-end capability architecture. The plan is fully ready for implementation and the lack of serious consideration by NASA was shameful. If MSR gets resuscitated and awarded to Lockheed Martin, there won’t be any reasonable explanation for it aside from outright corruption.