Lockheed’s Rick Ambrose on Space Market, Manned Lunar Mission

Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin’s space business and a four-time Wash100 award recipient, told Yahoo Finance in a video posted Tuesday about the manned mission to the moon by 2024.

“We have the capability,” Ambrose said of the planned lunar mission. “We have to go fast, but we’re going to have to reuse a lot of the systems that we have today.”

He mentioned work on the Orion capsule as part of the Artemis mission, Lockheed’s partnership with Blue Origin on the lunar lander, NASA’s partnership with the European Space Agency on the service module and the involvement of Northrop Grumman and Draper in the initiative.

Ambrose also talked about United Launch Alliance – a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing, and ULA’s effort to redesign the Vulcan rocket as part of the next-generation launch vehicle.

When asked about national security risks posed by China’s satellite launches, Ambrose said he believes the Asian country has a vibrant program and that he is not worried about it.

“I like to put it in different framing as not a space race, but for space to be viable, it has to be a vibrant marketplace, like any other industry. There’s 75 space-faring nations today. And as we move forward, supply chains, competitors, for it to be vibrant, we have to have that level of competition,” he added.