NASA tries backyard camping on a cosmic scale

While Lockheed Martin begins work on the next manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, engineers at NASA?s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt are already working on an expedition to scope out a moon base.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, an unmanned pod carrying a variety of instrumentation, will search the moon?s poles for a stable place to land and, hopefully, find some trace of frozen water the base?s inhabitants could use.