WASHINGTON – The Blue Origin-led team that is one of three working on lunar lander concepts for NASA’s Artemis program has delivered a full-size mockup to the testing and engineering agency.
Blue Origin announced Aug. 20 that its “National Team” has installed a Lander engineering model in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at Johnson Space Center. The mockup in full but low fidelity, includes both the origin element, developed by Blue Origin, and ascent element, built by Lockheed Martin, and stands more than 12 feet high.
The companies developed the mockup to allow NASA astronauts and engineers to study the car’s layout, including positioning of various components, and to get feedback while the lander is still at an early stage of development.
“You can think of it as a few categories of reviews,” Brent Sherwood, vice president of advanced development programs at Blue Origin, said in an interview. One is cabin ergonomics, as well as controls and monitors in the spaceship. A second is viewing angles that look out of the cabin. The evaluation will include people with space suits testing to get in and out of the lander and gain access to equipment.
With these tests, they can get early feedback on the design at a point where it is easier and faster to make changes. “You think you know what the good thing is to design and you try it out, and you get feedback,” he said. “That tells you what to do next.”
Despite advances in virtual reality, companies say that a physical model like this mockup is still essential in refining the lander’s design. “Cooperation that you can do physically is really important,” said Kirk Shireman, who joined Lockheed Martin Space this summer as vice president of lunar campaigns shortly after retiring from NASA as her program manager International Space Station. Virtual reality systems, he said, “can’t tell the whole picture, so it’s great to have that physical vehicle there, too.”
That includes, he said, problems such as placing windows and other components that affect the overall structure of the lander elements. “They affect large pieces of the structure that are long leading and need to be finalized so we can start production.”
The tests will also identify things that the designers have forgotten. “The most interesting part of doing this kind of mockup assessment is finding things you didn’t think of,” Sherwood said. “There will be surprises revealed by this kind of physical environment, if you can be in it and see and feel it.”
The mockup is one of several lines of work carried out by the team, which also includes Northrop Grumman, who develops the transfer element that moves the lander to lunar base, and Draper, who provides the guidance and avionics. Sherwood said Blue Origin has conducted tests of its BE-7 engine, which adds to the take-off stage, at the Marshall Space Flight Center, as well as working on storage technologies for the cryogenic fuels of that engine.
The Blue Origin-led team is one of three that won Human April System (HLS) awards at NASA in April, and received $ 579 million. A team led by Dynetics won another HLS award, valued at $ 253 million, while SpaceX won the third prize, valued at $ 135 million.
The companies are about halfway through these contracts and are already looking forward to the next competition. Sherwood said the Blue Origin-led team is preparing for a certification baseline evaluation in the coming weeks, and expects NASA to release a draft call for proposals for the next phase of the program in early September. Those proposals will come in late fall for a downselect to one or two companies next spring.
Whether NASA will be able to continue supporting one or two landers will depend on both the status of the concepts and the funding available. NASA sought $ 3.3 billion for the HLS program in its fiscal year 2021 fiscal year proposal, but a spending bill passed by the House in July yields less than $ 630 million. The House of Representatives has yet to adopt its version of a spending bill.
Sherwood said that uncertain budget is the biggest risk to having a lander ready to take astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2024. “This program works on the speed of credits,” he said. “The program plan brings us there, but it all depends on the budget.”
That is beyond the control of any of the companies in the program. “All we can control is the work we have to do,” he said.
Sherwood and Shireman said, with budget issues, that they were confident that their country could win NASA’s ongoing support and be ready by 2024. “Our experience as a team, our experience with this hardware, will really be a huge benefit as we look to ahead, NASA’s goal is to put the next people on the moon by 2024, ‘Shireman said.
The mockup is a big step in that effort, Sherwood said. “This is really the beginning that it becomes real.”
