Lockheed Martin's Space Proposal

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has issued a white paper that lays out a series of missions to be flown by the Orion spacecraft that would build confidence and experience before moving to deep space missions to asteroids or Mars. These "stepping stone" missions would begin with Earth orbital shakedowns of Orion and move to lunar voyages, culminating in "L2 Farside" missions.

The L2 point is 40,000 miles beyond lunar orbit, where Earth's gravity and the Moon's gravity balance. A ship at that point could remain there indefinitely. The crew of such a ship would also have a spectacular view of both the lunar farside and Earth. LM argues such lunar missions would allow testing of technology and techniques to be used in future deep space missions while allowing astronauts to teleoperate robots on the farside to build giant telescope arrays and to explore the farside by teleoperating rovers on the lunar surface.

It's an interesting proposal, and fills in a blank left by President Obama's proposal to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025. Surely, several flights will need to be flown before that mission is attempted, as LM points out. Something else needs to be pointed out, too. LM builds Orion. A series of Orion flights, therefore, would mean a series of Orion spacecraft would need to be built-- presumably by LM, and presumably at some good profit. The money angle should not, by itself, invalidate LM's proposal, but it must be noted.