![A rendering of the Blue Moon Human Landing System on the Moon for NASA's Artemis program. Credit: Blue Origin](https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Fwf8BsPWYAAVfDO.jpg)
A rendering of the Blue Moon Human Landing System on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program. Credit: Blue Origin
A team led by Blue Origin has been chosen by NASA to construct a second Human Landing System for the agency’s Artemis program.
Called Blue Moon, the general lander is being developed by Blue Origin. The corporate is partnered with Boeing, Astrobotic, Lockheed Martin, Draper and Honeybee Robotics. Together, they’ll develop the vehicle that can begin landing astronauts on the Moon’s south pole starting with Artemis 5 no sooner than 2029.
Blue Origin with its Blue Moon is the second provider chosen to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program. The opposite is SpaceX with its Lunar Starship, which is anticipated to the touch down on the lunar surface with a crew as early as 2026 during Artemis 3. Each will compete for future landings beyond Artemis 5.
“Having two distinct lunar lander designs, with different approaches to how they meet NASA’s mission needs, provides more robustness and ensures a daily cadence of Moon landings,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager for NASA’s Human Landing System Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “This competitive approach drives innovation, brings down costs, and invests in industrial capabilities to grow the business opportunities that may serve other customers and foster a lunar economy.”
Similar to with the Starship lander, astronauts are expected to fly to cislunar space in an Orion spacecraft, launched via NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, to rendezvous and dock with Blue Moon. Two or 4 astronauts would then transfer to the lander for a surface mission.
Blue Moon is about 52 feet (16 meters) tall and is designed to slot in the 23-foot (7-meter) payload fairing of Blue Origin’s Recent Glenn rocket, which the corporate can also be currently developing.
The lander is anticipated to have a dry mass of about 16 metric tons. When its liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants are added, its mass increases to greater than 45 metric tons.
Blue Origin is working on a solar-powered 20-degree Kelvin cryocooler to forestall its super-chilled propellants from boiling off. That propellant will probably be used for the lander’s BE-7 engines, which the corporate has been developing for years.
In a departure from traditional landers, the crew compartment will probably be below the propellant tanks, placing the astronauts as near the surface as possible after reaching the Moon’s surface.
The habitat section will include an airlock in addition to a docking port that can allow it to dock with NASA’s Lunar Gateway, which will probably be stationed in an elliptical near-rectilinear halo orbit across the Moon. The docking port may be used to transfer to other surface hardware, similar to a pressurized rover, in a shirt-sleeve environment.
Blue Origin said the lander can reach a near-rectilinear halo orbit (the placement of the Lunar Gateway) in a single launch. Nonetheless, to go from there to the lunar surface would require its tanks to be refilled.
To do that, Lockheed Martin is designing a cislunar transport vehicle that could be refilled in low Earth orbit, possibly using a tanker launched atop a Recent Glenn rocket. The cislunar transport vehicle would then travel to the lander in near-rectilinear halo orbit to transfer the cryogenic liquid before returning to low Earth orbit for use again.
It’s unclear what number of trips will probably be required to refill the Blue Moon lander. But the corporate said once full, it could travel from the Gateway to the Moon’s surface and back to the Gateway before needing to be refilled again.
There will probably be two variants of this lander. In a reusable configuration (as it is going to be for crews), it could take about 20 tons to the Moon’s surface and back. If in a one-way expendable mode, that could be increased to not less than 30 tons to send hardware, similar to a lunar habitat, to the lunar south pole.
NASA said it awarded Blue Origin $3.4 billion to develop this lander. The corporate said it’s putting not less than that much of its own money into the project.
Under the contract, Blue Origin is required to perform not less than one uncrewed test landing in 2028 before flying crew in 2029 during Artemis 5. It is going to construct a second lander for the crewed mission, however the test lander may be reused in the longer term.
The Artemis 5 landing mission is anticipated to be a duration of about every week. Eventually NASA wants Artemis surface stays to last on the order of a month because the agency tests capabilities for future Mars missions within the late 2030s.
“We’re in a golden age of human spaceflight, which is made possible by NASA’s industrial and international partnerships,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Together, we’re investing within the infrastructure that can pave the approach to land the primary astronauts on Mars.”
The Human Landing System program
Each Blue Origin and SpaceX are developing industrial human-rated landers for the Artemis program under NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships, or NextSTEP, which is a program the agency is using for public-private partnerships for the event of deep space exploration capabilities.
In 2021, SpaceX was awarded a contract price $2.89 billion for a lander under Appendix H Option A of this program, which was for an initial-capability lunar lander.
SpaceX’s Lunar Starship is the most important of the landers. It’s based on the 164-foot (50-meter) tall “ship” portion of the corporate’s fully reusable mega rocket, currently in development in South Texas.
Under this initial contract, SpaceX is anticipated to send an uncrewed lander to the Moon as early as 2024 or 2025. To do this can require the Starship system to display it could reach orbit. The corporate also has to prove out in-space cryogenic propellent transfer and long-term in-space cryogenic storage with minimal boiloff.
![A rendering of SpaceX's Lunar Starship Human Landing System. Credit: SpaceX](https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/for_press_release.jpg)
A rendering of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship Human Landing System. Credit: SpaceX
Using a Starship tanker variant, a propellant depot (also based on Starship) in low Earth orbit will probably be filled, requiring several launches, before the lander variant is launched. Lunar Starship would then use the depot to refill its tanks before flying to the Moon.
After a successful uncrewed test, SpaceX might want to do all of it once again for the crewed Artemis 3 mission as early as 2026. As for all Artemis landing missions, the Starship lander is anticipated to loiter in an elliptical near-rectilinear halo orbit across the Moon, waiting for an Orion spacecraft and its crew, launching atop a Space Launch System rocket, to rendezvous and dock with the vehicle.
Two astronauts are then expected to transfer to the lander and travel to the lunar south pole.
In 2022, SpaceX was awarded $1.15 billion under Option B of NextSTEP Appendix H, which is for a second-generation Starship landing system that has added requirements for sustainability. This includes support for longer surface stays with crews of as much as 4 astronauts.
This second Lunar Starship is projected for use for the Artemis 4 mission, no sooner than 2028. Unlike throughout the Artemis 3 mission, this second Starship is anticipated to first dock with the Lunar Gateway outpost, which is ready to be stationed in a near-rectilinear halo orbit across the Moon by late 2026 to be the primary stop for all future Artemis starting with Artemis 4.
Blue Origin was awarded a contract under NextSTEP Appendix P “Sustaining Lunar Development,” which is for a second sustainable-class lander. Since SpaceX was already awarded a contract under Appendix H Option B, it was ineligible to compete for this contract.
For landing missions beyond Artemis 5, NASA plans to purchase landing services from these corporations under the Lunar Exploration Transportation Services program, or LETS. This will probably be akin to how NASA uses the Business Crew Program to purchase services from SpaceX and Boeing for transportation to the International Space Station.
While Blue Origin and SpaceX will probably be eligible for competition under LETS, it’s possible for other corporations to compete for Artemis landings should they develop a capable lander with NASA’s sustainability requirements.
The opposite company competing for this Appendix P contract was Dynetics, which was developing a reusable methane-fueled lander called ALPACA, or Autonomous Logistics Platform for All-Moon Cargo Access. It’s unclear if the corporate will proceed development of this method by itself.