A U.S. aerospace company says it is proposing a
mission to send a crew to a stationary spot in orbit over the far side of the moon.
While NASA has officially abandoned any manned moon missions anytime soon, Lockheed Martin has begun promoting a Farside Mission using the Orion
spacecraft it is developing, SPACE.com reported.
Such an endeavor could sharpen skills and technologies needed for proposed trips to an asteroid, the company says, as well as practice techniques for exploring Mars by remote operations as astronauts orbit the red planet.
Both missions are goals under the new direction for NASA that President Barack Obama has put forward, with the intention of landing people on an asteroid by 2025 and sending astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.
Engineers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver have proposed using their Orion capsule on a moon mission that would allow a crew to have
continuous line-of-sight visibility to both the entire far side of the moon and Earth.
Orion missions to the moon's far side, considered possible by 2016 to 2018, would accomplish scientific goals on the lunar surface using robotic rovers controlled by the crew in orbit "as practice for doing the same thing at Mars," Josh Hopkins of Lockheed Martin's Human Spaceflight Advanced Programs department said.