Spaceflight

Manufacturer Lockheed Martin is exploring how it might sell flights as “fixed-price commercial services,” an executive told attendees here.

“There’s certainly other nations that are interested in flying people out to deep space,” said Kirk Shireman, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for human space exploration and the company’s head of the Orion program. He shared the stage with Howard Hu, the NASA Orion program manager, for a session titled “Orion: Our Ride to Deep Space.”

“I think the model going forward” will include “industry having arrangements with foreign space agencies,” Shireman said.

Making that transition will require Lockheed Martin to boost Orion production while continuing to bring down the cost per vehicle, he said, something the company has begun under its current production contract with NASA. That deal covers capsules for the first six lunar landings planned under the Artemis program, with an option for NASA to purchase six more. The capsules for the 2022 uncrewed Artemis I demonstration and next year’s crewed Artemis II test flight were contracted separately.

“I think personally that humans going into deep space and being able to do those things sustainably, long term” is “really, really important for our country,” Shireman said. “To do that, we have to be able to do things more sustainably, more efficiently, at a higher pace than what we’re doing right now.”

Part of that cost-reduction strategy, he said, is aiming for “aggressive reusability,” in which more and more of Orion’s components — and eventually entire capsules — will be refurbished and reflown for multiple missions.