Lockheed Martin Space Systems, prime contractor on NASA’s Orion deep-space crew capsule, is rigging a mockup of the seven-seat spacecraft with the wiring, avionics and flight software it will use for its first mission to lunar space in 2018.

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Dan Leone is the NASA reporter for SpaceNews, where he also covers other civilian-run U.S. government space programs and a growing number of entrepreneurial space companies. He joined SpaceNews in 2011.Dan earned a bachelor's degree in public communications...