There's also a pair of special initiatives for students. Classrooms will participate in a virtual field trip to Lockheed's Spacecraft Operations Simulation Center on October 4th. There's a challenge that will award cash prizes (up to $10,000) for students who produce videos explaining how they would design a Mars habitation module. Potential explorers have until December 15th to enter.

These kinds of education efforts are relatively common in the technology world. Apple even built an app just for teaching programming to kids. However, it's more than a little rare in the spaceflight industry, where the career path tends to be both longer and less direct (numerous astronauts were previously military pilots, for instance). Lockheed is clearly willing to bet that an investment now will pay off decades down the road.