NASA today hired Lockheed Martin to build the spaceship that will replace the space shuttles and carry astronauts to the space station, the moon and Mars.
The Maryland-based company plans to do final assembly, checkout and testing of the spacecraft here at the Kennedy Space Center, bringing a minimum of 300 to 400 jobs to Florida's Space Coast. That would ease the pain of space job cuts related to the retirement of the space shuttle orbiters in 2010.
Lockheed Martin will design, develop and build up to eight of the spacecraft under the terms of a contract that could be worth about $8 billion through 2019. The work would be split between Florida, Texas and Colorado. The latter site is where most of Lockheed's space engineering forces are located.
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IMAGE NOTE: Click to enlarge this NASA artist's concept of the Orion spacecraft, which Lockheed Martin will build to send U.S. astronauts on missions to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars.
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