A private team led by space company Jeff Bezos Blue origin has provided a mock-up of its manned lunar lander to NASA for testing.
In early April, NASA announced that it had grant awarded to three commercial groups – SpaceX, Dynetics and the “National Team” leader Blue Blue – to develop human landing systems for the agency Artemis monthly reconnaissance program.
These companies need to work hard, given that NASA wants to land two astronauts near the South Pole of the moon in 2024. And the National Team has now given the agency hardware to work with: a full-scale engineering mock-up of its lunar lander, which was delivered today to Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston (August 20).
Related: NASA wants private lunar landers from 3 companies. Here’s how they will work.
“Testing this engineering mock-up for crew interaction is a step toward making this historic mission a reality,” said Brent Sherwood, Vice President of Blue Origin’s Advanced Development Programs. said in a statement.
“The learning we get from full-scale mock-ups cannot be done any other way,” Sherwood said. “Taking advantage of NASA’s expertise and feedback at this early stage, we can develop a secure commercial system that meets the agency’s needs.”
The national team consists of Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. The companies are developing a landing system with three separate pieces: a descent element to guide astronauts to the lunar plane, a rising element to launch them off the moon, and a transfer element, a driving stage that sends the descending element of the lunar orbit down to the gray filth.
The newly delivered mock-up, which stands more than 40 feet (12 meters) high, shows the up and down elements, representatives of Blue Origin said. It will remain with JSC through early 2021.
The descent stage is based on Blue Origin’s Robotic lunar lander from Blue Moon, which is also in development. The ascending stage uses much of the technology used by NASA Orion crew capsule, of which Lockheed Martin is the main contractor. Orion is an integral part of the Artemis program; astronauts from Earth will board the capsule, which will ride on top of NASA’s enormous Spaceship system rocket.
The transfer phase also has a lot of heritage; it is based on the Northrop Grumman robot Cygnus cargo ship, which has been transporting cargo to the International Space Station for NASA since 2013.
The National Team, Dynetics and SpaceX split $ 967 million in NASA funding, which goes after 10 months of development work. The agency will then select one or more of the teams to continue maturing their landing systems, ultimately purchasing crew flights from the options still on the table in 2024 and beyond.
Dynetics is developing a two-stage landing system, and SpaceX proposed to use its Starship Mars-colonizing spaceship for the Artemis work.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
