WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has unveiled a full-sized mockup of an uncrewed version of its Blue Moon lunar lander that may test technologies intended for a crewed version it’s developing for NASA’s Artemis effort.
In social media posts Oct. 27, the corporate showed images of the Blue Moon Mark 1 mockup, situated at an engine manufacturing facility in Huntsville, Alabama. The lander is designed to deliver three tons of cargo to the lunar surface.
The primary flight of Blue Moon Mark 1 will likely be what the corporate calls the “Pathfinder Mission,” designated MK1-SN001. “MK1-SN001 proves out critical systems, including the BE-7 engine, cryogenic fluid power and propulsions systems, avionics, continuous downlink communications, and precision landing,” the corporate stated on its website.
Blue Origin said that future Mark 1 landers, starting with MK-SN002, will likely be available to hold customer payloads. Blue Origin is one in every of 14 corporations which can be a part of NASA’s Business Lunar Payload Services program for uncrewed lunar landings. The corporate, though, didn’t state when the Pathfinder Mission or future Blue Moon Mark 1 landers might launch.
“There’s two Mark 1 lunar pathfinder landers that may fly on early flights of Recent Glenn,” Ben Cichy, senior director of engineering of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said on a panel discussion at AIAA’s ASCEND conference Oct. 23, but was no more specific about launch dates.
John Couluris, senior vp of lunar transportation at Blue Origin, said on a panel on the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium Oct. 25 that the Mark 1 lander was a part of a continuum that features the Mark 2 lander intended for crewed landings. NASA chosen that lander as a part of its Human Landing System (HLS) program in May, joining SpaceX’s Starship.
He noted that NASA’s requirements for HLS include landing inside 100 meters of a delegated location. Blue Origin is developing a terrain relative navigation system using lidar, tested on Recent Shepard suborbital flights after which afterward Mark 1 landings, to get the landing precision “right down to single-digit meters,” he said.
The Blue Origin announcement coincided with a social media post by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, which showed him seeing the Blue Moon mockup with a gaggle that included Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. Nelson said Blue Moon “will help ensure a gentle cadence of astronauts on the Moon to live and work before we enterprise to Mars.”
Neither NASA nor Blue Origin disclosed when Nelson and Bezos visited the power, but Nelson was in Huntsville Oct. 25 to talk on the von Braun Symposium.
Starship progress
The crewed version of Blue Moon is slated for use on the Artemis 5 mission, likely no sooner than late this decade. The Artemis 3 and 4 landings will use SpaceX’s Starship.
On the von Braun Symposium, Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said a “major focus” of Starship lander development is on guidance, navigation and control technologies needed for lunar landers, in addition to thermal control and power generation systems.
“The excellent news is we’ve been working through numerous milestones on this system and numerous technologies that we’re developing and improving on,” he said. That has benefited from a “huge wealth of experience” from other SpaceX programs, like Dragon missions to the International Space Station. “Those are going to be among the areas which can be tough, but they’re definitely things that we are able to accomplish as a team to make this occur.”
One among the largest challenges, though, has been getting the integrated Starship/Super Heavy vehicle flying. Delays in that effort has led to public concerns from NASA officials in regards to the overall development of the Starship lunar lander and, in turn, the Artemis 3 mission currently scheduled for launch in late 2025.
Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, suggested in August that NASA might consider unspecified alternative missions for Artemis 3 if there have been “big slips” in Starship. At the moment, he said NASA had just received an updated schedule of Starship development from SpaceX, but that the agency needed “a while to digest it.”
Speaking on a panel on the von Braun Symposium Oct. 25, Free didn’t disclose details about that schedule and the way it’d affect Artemis 3. “What I’m really joyful about is that they’ve shown us that end-to-end focus,” he said, including the assorted milestones leading as much as a crewed landing.
“We’d like OFT 2 to go, so I hope everybody on this room is cheering on OFT 2,” he said, referring to the second orbital flight test of Starship/Super Heavy. “We’d like that to achieve success to get us that much further down the road.”
Free said the main focus for Artemis 3 mustn’t be on Starship alone, citing work needed on Orion, which can fly with a docking ring for the primary time on that mission, the Space Launch System and spacesuits being developed by Axiom Space.
“The schedule that they’ve given us shows us their thoughts on the progress to get to those dates,” he said of SpaceX’s Starship schedule. “Now we have to work out how that matches into the remaining of the enterprise to get to that mission date.”