Lockheed Martin gives look at astronauts’ future habitat

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — A massive cylindrical habitat may one day house up to four astronauts as they make the trek to deep space.

Lockheed Martin gave a first look at what one of these habitats might look like Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center, where the aerospace giant is under contract with NASA to build a prototype of the living quarters.

Lockheed is one of six contractors — the others are Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Space Systems, Orbital ATK, NanoRacks and Bigelow Aerospace, which is based in North Las Vegas — that NASA awarded a combined $65 million to build a habitat prototype by the end of the year. The agency will then review the proposals to reach a better understanding of the systems and interfaces that need to be in place to facilitate living in deep space.

Lockheed’s design uses the Donatello Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, a refurbished module dating back to the space shuttle era that was once destined to transfer cargo to the International Space Station. But Donatello was never sent into space, and the module has now instead been transformed into Lockheed’s prototype.

At about 15 feet wide and nearly 22 feet long, the cylindrical capsule is roughly the size of a small bus. But it’ll be a tight fit if four astronauts reside in it for 30 to 60 days, as Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed envisions.

The capsule is designed to house racks for science, life support systems, sleep stations, exercise machines and robotic work stations, said Bill Pratt, the program’s manager.

“You think of it as an RV in deep space,” he said during a tour of the prototype. “When you’re in an RV, your table becomes your bed and things are always moving around, so you have to be really efficient with the space. That’s a lot of what we are testing here.”

The team used augmented reality headsets, which overlay real hardware with simulations, to visualize the layout of the capsule — saving time and helping Lockheed catch errors early on.

Another cost-saving measure: the reuse of Donatello.

“We want to get to the moon and to Mars as quickly as possible, and we feel like we actually have a lot of stuff that we can use to do that,” Pratt said.