29.10.2023

“We’re building our landers to enable global landing capability on the Moon, day or night."

Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin's founder, meets NASA Administrator Bill Nelson with a mock-up of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander behind them.

Blue Origin has unveiled a mock-up of the Blue Moon lander it says will be ready to fly to the Moon within the next three years as a precursor to human landings on a larger vehicle, perhaps at the end of the decade.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin, recently showed off the "low-fidelity" mock-up to NASA officials at the company's engine production facility in Huntsville, Alabama. The vehicle is undoubtedly large and will take advantage of the 23-foot-wide (7-meter) payload volume on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

This is the Mark 1 variant of the Blue Moon lander. It's designed to deliver up to 3 metric tons (about 6,600 pounds) of cargo anywhere on the lunar surface. Blue Origin revealed the design on Friday.

"Blue Moon Mark 1 is a single-launch, lunar cargo lander that remains on the surface and provides safe, reliable, and affordable access to the lunar environment," Blue Origin wrote on its website. The company is developing the Mark 1 as a predecessor to the larger Mark 2 lander, which will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface under contract to NASA, which selected Blue Origin as its second human-rated lunar lander contractor in May, alongside SpaceX.

“We’re building our landers, both our Mark 1 and our Mark 2, to enable global landing capability on the Moon, day or night," said John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar transportation at Blue Origin.

Schedule uncertainty

NASA's first landing target for Artemis is the lunar south pole, where scientists have discovered evidence for large deposits of water ice in the bottoms of dark craters. There's a lot of work to do before that happens.

With its $3.4 billion fixed-price Human Landing System (HLS) contract with NASA, Blue Origin will be responsible for transporting astronauts between lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon, then back into space, on the Artemis V mission. This mission is officially scheduled for no sooner than 2029, but is likely to slip into the 2030s.

NASA has contracted with SpaceX for two crew lunar landings with its giant Starship vehicle on the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions, officially slated for late 2025 and 2028. Those missions are also likely to be delayed, with schedule pressures ranging from the readiness of the Starship lander and spacesuits to the construction of a new mobile launch platform and an enlarged upper stage for NASA's Space Launch System rocket.

SpaceX's priority, for now, is to get the Starship rocket into orbit, and then the company needs to test refueling technology in space, a capability that will require numerous successful Starship launches. Then SpaceX plans to fly an unpiloted demonstration mission to land Starship on the Moon, ahead of the first crew flight.

It's not just SpaceX's readiness that concerns NASA about the schedule for Artemis III.

"We have a whole bunch of components that have to come together for (Artemis) III," said Jim Free, the senior NASA manager who oversees the Artemis program. "We’ve got a whole new Orion that's going to have a docking system on it ... We should never rest on our laurels on SLS. That's got to come together because we build a whole new vehicle every time.

"We need suits to come together, and as the suits are very much in their early technical phase of design and development, nobody should rest easy," Free said.

"Every single contractor has got to perform on every mission, and they have to do it to a higher level than they ever have because now we're flying humans," he said.

The evolution of Blue Moon

Blue Origin's HLS architecture is similar to that of SpaceX in that it also requires refueling in space. But Blue Moon uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, while SpaceX's Starship burns liquid methane. Blue Origin will also launch its landers aboard the company's New Glenn rocket, which is not expected to launch until late next year at the earliest. For each human-rated lander mission, Blue Origin needs three New Glenn launches—one to send the lander to an orbit around the Moon, then two more launches to carry parts for a Lockheed Martin-built refueling tug to fill the lander's tanks in lunar orbit.

Astronauts flying from Earth on NASA's SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft will link up with the landers—from SpaceX or Blue Origin, depending on the mission—in orbit around the Moon, then ride to the lunar surface. The landers will transport the crews back to the Orion spacecraft for return to Earth.

Blue Origin's Mark 1 lander will first fly to the Moon on a demonstration mission, with additional flights planned to carry science payloads to the lunar surface. The first two Mark 1 missions are scheduled to fly no later than 2026, according to Aviation Week.

Bezos first revealed the Blue Moon lander program in 2019, and he presented a spacecraft that looks a lot different from the one Blue Origin is working on today. It used the same hydrogen-fueled BE-7 engine, another Blue Origin product in development, but the Blue Moon cargo lander Bezos showed off four years ago was shorter and squatter.

Then Blue Origin partnered with a so-called "National Team" of space industry giants in 2019 to bid for NASA's first HLS contract. This consortium included Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Draper Laboratory, and the lander design would have included three distinct parts. NASA picked SpaceX over the Blue Origin proposal in 2021, then Blue Origin filed a lawsuit to protest NASA's choice of SpaceX.

After a court dismissed the suit, Blue Origin went back to the drawing board and came up with a fully reusable lander design. After it's done with its first Artemis landing, the Mark 2 lander can loiter in lunar orbit for refueling ahead of additional landing missions.

But Blue Origin and SpaceX need to prove they can safely land on the Moon before NASA will put it astronauts onboard Blue Moon or Starship. The Mark 1 lander announced Friday will move Blue Origin in that direction.

"MK1-SN001 (the first Mark 1 lander) proves out critical systems, including the BE-7 engine, cryogenic fluid power and propulsions systems, avionics, continuous downlink communications, and precision landing within 100-meter site accuracy, prior to the uncrewed NASA Human Landing System mission for the Artemis program," Blue Origin said.

Couluris, who oversees the Blue Moon program at Blue Origin, said this week Blue Origin is working on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology to enable precision landings on the Moon.

"NASA has a requirement to land within 100 meters within a designated location," he said Wednesday at Wernher von Braun Symposium in Alabama. "We utilize LIDAR terrain relative navigation to get that day-night capability, looking for landmarks."

He said tests of the navigation sensors during landings of Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard rocket have shown it could be used to land with a precision of "single-digit meters."

"We are a hydrogen-based vehicle," Couluris said. "We do that not only because it’s one of the most energetic combinations of propellants, but it also allows us to provide our reaction control system propellants, and our power."

"So we utilize fuel cells for the night side, and solar arrays for the day side, but eventually we look to evolve that to regenerative fuel cells so that we’ll start electrolysis of water."

Liquid hydrogen is notoriously difficult to handle. It has to be stored at super-cold temperatures or else it will boil off, and its shelf life in space has historically been measured in hours, not in days, weeks, or months. Blue Origin has agreements with NASA to develop cryogenic fluid management and fluid transfer tech, what Couluris described as "the couplers and the pumps to transfer cryogenics from refuelers to landers."

The long-term vision is to tap into ice on the Moon to generate hydrogen and liquid oxygen rocket propellants. At best, that's still a decade or two away from happening at a level meaningful for producing rocket fuel.

“If we can make hydrogen a storable propellant, with zero boil-off systems, we’re now not only unlocking lunar resources but the potential to open things such as NTP (Nuclear Thermal Propulsion) or other propulsion technologies that go beyond," Couluris said.

Quelle: arsTechnica