Aerospace giants hope to build next NASA craft.

Byline: Mark Carreau

Nov. 10--Boeing NASA Systems of Houston will team with another aerospace giant to bid on building the successor to the space shuttle, a spacecraft that would take explorers to the moon and Mars, officials from the two companies announced Tuesday.

The partnership of the Boeing division and the smaller California-based Northrop Grumman could extend to work on an even wider range of human and robotic spacecraft required to fulfill President Bush's space initiative announced in January. The strategy calls for lunar landings by 2020 and the first human explorations of Mars a decade later.

Though Congress has yet to approve funding, NASA plans to award design contracts to a pair of competitors for the new Crew Exploration Vehicle by late next year and wants to settle on a single spacecraft-development team in 2008.

"Now, we have the minds of two major companies put together to come up with innovations to make this more affordable and more sustainable," said Doug Young, the lead executive for Project Constellation at Northrop Grumman's Integrated System Sector office in suburban Los Angeles. "If we were doing this separately, we might not get some of the synergies that come from our deep experience bases."

The Congressional Budget Office recently projected spending nearly $25 billion by 2020 on the new exploration vehicle. It projected costs of $64 billion for all human and robotic exploration efforts during the same period.

NASA hasn't said whether it will manage the growing ...