The Orion spacecraft may carry more than NASA missions to the Moon

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin, which is manufacturing the Orion spacecraft for NASA's deep space missions, plans to study whether some commercial payloads could fly along for the ride toward the Moon. The company says it expects to have some limited capacity inside the Orion spacecraft, as well as space outside the spacecraft for CubeSats, experiments, or other privately developed payloads.

"We'd like to go understand what market interest there would be in using Orion during the exploration missions for commercial, static payloads mounted externally or internally," Rob Chambers, Lockheed's director of Human Spaceflight Strategy for Commercial Civil Space, said in an interview with Ars.

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