The first woman on the moon may be just years away, according to Blue Origins founder Jeff Bezos. His team has been working with top leaders in space technology to win a bid from NASA to build lunar landers that will transport humans, including potentially the first female, to the moon's surface.
Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of commercial civil space at Lockheed Martin, said human curiosity is driving the company to compete for the chance to design the human landing system.
"We haven't been there in 48 years, and I think the technology is available now for us to do that. And, as humans, we like to explore," she told Cheddar.
The company was one of three tapped by Blue Origin to work on the project along with Northrop Grumman and Draper. According to Callahan, the partnership will prove the enterprise's capability to get the job done safely and efficiently.
"One of the things I'm really excited about the Blue Origin partnership is that it's really leveraging the entrepreneurship and innovation of Blue Origin with the heritage that Northrop Grumman, Draper, and Lockheed Martin bring. All three of the heritage companies participated in Apollo and have been operating in deep space and with humans for quite some time," Callahan said.
The company also secured a $4.6 billion contract from NASA last year to produce the Orion spacecraft for future missions
"We at Lockheed Martin are going to leverage our heritage in deep space exploration, and specifically the investment the government has made in the Orion spacecraft, to build the asset element as a part of the Blue Origin team," Callahan added.
Human exploration of the moon is just the tip of the iceberg for Lockheed Martin's plans. According to Callahan, trips to the moon will be test runs for missions to Mars, where astronauts will have full autonomy for extended periods of time.
"The trip to the Moon is just a few days where Mars is several months to a year, and so I think it's important if we want the humans to survive and we want to bring them back safely, that we have an opportunity to really practice that at the moon," she said.
Much like the International Space Station, which has had active astronauts aboard full-time since 2000, Lockheed Martin plans to set up shop on the moon in an effort to expand human knowledge of the solar system.
"Unlike the Apollo missions that they just had a few of, we really want to stay at the moon and learn how to operate, as I said, in deep space and then be able to use that as a launching off point to take humans even deeper into deep space," Callahan noted.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
