Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Two Colorado Firms Selected For Mars Space Habitat Prototypes

Two, Colorado companies are among six that have been selected to help develop deep space habitat prototypes by NASA, the space agency said this week, to help it advance missions toward Mars. According to NASA, Lockeed Martin in Denver, and Sierra Nevada Corporation's Space Systems in Louisville have both been selected to create both prototypes and concepts for "deep space habitats"--for future human spaceflight missions. The total contract awards for all six of the companies is worth $65M. The effort looks to bring to life some of the details of the‌ kind of habitat fictionally portrayed in "The Martian", the 2015 Matt Damon movie and earlier book of the same name, where a future, Mars-stranded astronaut converts his NASA habitat into an ad-hoc farm, and faces a catastrophic failure of that same deep space habitat, throwing his survival into jeopardy.