Lockheed, Northrop Give CEV Proposals to NASA

摘要

NASA went ahead and accepted Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) proposals from teams led by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman even as the U.S. space agency continues to develop plans to speed up by several years its multibil-lion-dollar effort to replace the space shuttle with a vehicle capable of going to the Moon. NASA previously had planned to give both teams separate $1 billion contracts in the fall to spend the next three years preparing for CEV prototype flight demonstrations meant to help the space agency pick a single contractor by 2009 to design and build an operational vehicle that would be ready to fly by 2014.