Wood
25th November 2010, 23:06
After the LCROSS missile (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2242295/nasa_firing_lcross_missile_into_the.html) to the moon in Oct 2009, and after Obama & NASA shifting focus to Mars, now Lockheed Martin (military-industrial complex) proposes this mission.
Space planners at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver proposed using their Orion capsule to support an L2 farside moon mission – one that allows an astronaut crew to have continuous line-of-sight visibility to both the entire far side of the moon and Earth.
From a halo orbit around that L2 point, a crew would control robots on the lunar surface. Teleoperated science tasks include snagging rock specimens for return to Earth from the moon's South Pole-Aitken basin – one of the largest, deepest, and oldest craters in the solar system – as well as deploy a radio telescope array on the farside.
http://www.space.com/news/moon-far-side-astronaut-mission-101123.html
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/lockheed-martin-proposes-manned-orion-mission-dark-side-moon
Space planners at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver proposed using their Orion capsule to support an L2 farside moon mission – one that allows an astronaut crew to have continuous line-of-sight visibility to both the entire far side of the moon and Earth.
From a halo orbit around that L2 point, a crew would control robots on the lunar surface. Teleoperated science tasks include snagging rock specimens for return to Earth from the moon's South Pole-Aitken basin – one of the largest, deepest, and oldest craters in the solar system – as well as deploy a radio telescope array on the farside.
http://www.space.com/news/moon-far-side-astronaut-mission-101123.html
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/lockheed-martin-proposes-manned-orion-mission-dark-side-moon