LockMart wins Orion

A team led by Lockheed Martin has been selected by NASA to design, develop, and test the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), now named Orion. LM was selected over a team headed by Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

COMMENT: It will no doubt trouble a lot of people that LM's last spaceship development project for NASA, the X-33, was an unmitigated disaster. On the other hand, Boeing botched its highest-profile space project, the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), so badly the Pentagon took it away and gave it to LM. Northrop Grumman's flagship space program is the NPOESS environemntal satellite system, which has been a mess as well. So there was no opportunity to select a large American spacecraft builder with a pristine record of recent success. (LM's team includes Orbital Sciences, a smaller company that does have an almost spotless record for the last decade. Maybe it'll rub off. An innovative entry, T-space, which included the SpaceShipOne builders, quit the competition early, saying it was scared off by the sheer magnitude of the NASA bureaucracy and the mass of reports and documentation required to deal with it.)

Of the companies that built human spaceflight vehicles for the US, none exists anymore.
The record goes like this:
1970s: Space Shuttle: Rockwell International (sold to Boeing)
1960s: Apollo: North American (merged into Rockwell and hence to Boeing)
1960s: Gemini: McDonnell (merged into Boeing)
1960s: Mercury: McDonnell

Let's hope LM gets it right. This is NASA's big bet for decades to come. I wish the agency and the company all possible success.