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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company and its partners in the space industry say they gave NASA their proposal for a landing system designed to bring astronauts to the surface of the moon and bring them back. And they released a 10 minute video explaining how they plan to do it.
This week’s presentation of the proposed Option A by the team led by Blue Origin marks a critical step in NASA’s process to select the commercial companies that will build the human landing system (or systems) for its Artemis lunar program. The current schedule calls for the first manned landing of the Artemis to take place in 2024, although that date may be delayed.
NASA has identified three potential suppliers for the landing system, which would connect to NASA’s Orion deep space capsule or Gateway platform, yet to be built, in high lunar orbit. In addition to the Blue Origin “National Team”, California-based SpaceX and a team led by Alabama-based Dynetics are in the running.
Early next year, NASA is expected to select one or two teams to move on to the next phase of development.
Blue Origin’s main contribution to the National Team is to build the system’s descent element, which is based on its Blue Moon lander design.
Three stalwarts of the space industry are focusing on other elements of the landing system: Lockheed Martin will build the ascent element, which is based on the design of its Orion capsule and will contain the Artemis crew during their travels to and from the lunar surface. . . Northrop Grumman will build the transfer element, which is based on the design of its Cygnus cargo ship and will provide propulsion for the lander in lunar orbit. Draper is working on avionics.
The National Team provided a progress report in a video posted today.
In the seven months since he was selected as an Option A prospect, the team has been working behind the scenes to run 25 technical demos, said Brent Sherwood, vice president of advanced development programs at Blue Origin.
Those tests include this month’s tests for Blue Origin’s BE-7 rocket engine, October’s space demonstration of a precision landing system, simulated docking tests and cryogenic tests for booster tanks.
Steve Squyres, the chief scientist at Blue Origin, confirmed that Blue Origin is planning an unmanned cargo mission to the south pole region of the moon, a year before the manned Artemis mission, to demonstrate the capabilities of the descent element.
“That provides a tremendous amount of risk reduction,” said Squyres, a veteran of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover missions. “We got to practice. We can test everything first, with no crew on board, and we learn from that. We are going to learn a lot. “
A graphic accompanying the explanation of the Squyres video shows the unmanned Blue Moon lander using an onboard box to lower a rover to the surface. The graph suggests that other payloads could be ejected to the surface from the top of the lander.
The video includes a renowned endorsement of Harrison Schmitt, who was one of the last astronauts to walk on the moon and now serves as a member of the Blue Origin scientific advisory board. “The National Team is the kind of outstanding leadership, outstanding experience that I like to work with,” said Schmitt.
But the final word in the video is for Bezos, who has been funding Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin for the past 20 years.
“We have to use the resources of space,” Bezos says in a clip taken from last year’s presentation of the Blue Moon lander concept. “We must have a future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. They gave us a gift, this nearby body called the moon. And the job of this generation is to build that path into space, so that future generations can unleash their creativity. None of this is easy. Everything is hard. Big things start small. “
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