22.05.2025

Mark1

Blue Origin will attempt to land an uncrewed prototype of its Human Landing System (HLS) on the Moon’s south pole this year, John Couluris, senior vice president of Lunar Permanence, said May 20.

The company’s HLS is one of two in development in partnership with NASA to support crewed landings on the Moon under the Artemis program. NASA awarded the first two HLS flight service contracts to SpaceX, which plans to use a variant of its still-in-development Starship-Super Heavy system for NASA’s Artemis III and IV missions. Blue Origin’s HLS was tapped for Artemis V.

Blue Origin’s Mark I, which is slated to launch this year on a shakedown mission to the lunar south pole, is designed to carry nearly 3.9 tons to any location on the Moon’s surface. By contrast, the fleet of small robotic landers that NASA is backing under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services contracts are designed to carry up to about 1 ton.

Powered by a single liquid-oxygen and liquid-hydrogen-fueled BE-7 engine, the Mark I will launch aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket and aim to touch down within 33 ft. of its intended target, Couluris said at the opening day of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium conference at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Maryland.

Assembly of the BE-7 flight unit is nearly complete and is expected to ship out to Johnson Space Center in Houston in about six weeks for thermal vacuum chamber testing. “Once that’s done, it’ll come to Cape Canaveral, get integrated, get encapsulated, and then launch on New Glenn a few months after that,” Couluris said.

In addition to testing technologies and operations for future Mark II vehicles, the Mark I will host some NASA and commercial payloads, including a NASA-awarded experiment to measure BE-7 plume impingement on the lunar surface.

Couluris also unveiled an updated design for the HLS system’s transporter module. The vehicle is designed to launch separately on a New Glenn and be refueled in low Earth orbit using excess propellant from the rocket’s upper stage. The transporter would then travel to lunar orbit and refuel an awaiting Blue Origin lander ahead of a crew’s arrival via the Space Launch System and Orion capsule.

The transporter is capable of bringing roughly 110 tons from Earth orbit to lunar orbit, or up to 33 tons to Mars orbit. “This opens up the Solar System,” Couluris said.

A ground demonstration of zero boil-off cryogenic propellant storage is underway in Washington state, where Blue Origin is based. “By June, we will be showing that we are consistently holding [cryogenic] hydrogen/oxygen as storable propellants,” Couluris added. “It will be the first time on this scale that we’ve done this.”

Quelle: AVIATION WEEK