NASA chose Blue Origin to develop a lunar lander to transport astronauts on Artemis missions that began ten years later. At an event at NASA headquarters on May 19, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency had selected a team led by Blue Origin and included Boeing, Draper, and Lockheed Martin, among others. as a SpaceX development to transport astronauts between the lunar gate and the lunar surface.

The fixed-price award is worth $3.4 billion. Blue Origin’s program manager John Koulouris said at a briefing that the company plans to invest “north” of that amount to develop the landing craft. The contract includes a demonstration landing on Artemis 5, currently scheduled no earlier than the end of 2029, and an unmanned landing test flight about a year ago. Artemis 5 will be the third crewed landing of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign, following the Artemis 3 and 4 missions that will use SpaceX’s Starship.

Blue Origin was one of two bidders and a team led by Dynetics submitted the other bid. NASA officials did not explain why Blue Origin was chosen over Dynetics at the briefing, saying it will be published in a separate resource selection statement. The Blue Moon lander is a revised version of previous designs released by the company. The lander is 16 meters tall and is designed to fit inside the seven-metre payload of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. It has a dry mass of 16 metric tons and over 45 metric tons when filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

Preventing the cryogenic fuel from overflowing is an important technology for Blue Moon. “This is a great example of the public-private partnership we have with NASA,” Koulouris said. Said. For some time now, the company has been funding its own “zero boiling” technology, such as a cryo-cooler operating at 20 Kelvin.

“We want to make hydrogen a storable fuel,” he said. “If you can make hydrogen storable, you can do a lot of things.” He said this includes extracting hydrogen and oxygen from lunar sources to fuel landers.

In addition to the version designed to carry astronauts, Blue Origin is also planning a cargo version of the lander. It will be able to carry up to 20 metric tons to the lunar surface and return to lunar orbit, or carry up to 30 metric tons on one-way missions. Blue Origin is partnering with Lockheed Martin to build a “fission carrier” spacecraft that will transport fuel from low Earth orbit to a nearly flat halo orbit around the lander’s moon. This vehicle will refuel a lander designed for multi-mission use.

The all-terrain vehicle, which Blue Origin calls its “national team,” has a few more members. Draper will provide guidance, navigation and control systems, as well as training and simulation. Astrobotic will provide cargo docking, Honeybee Robotics cargo unloading capabilities and Boeing docking system.

“We have a strong group of very motivated, very humble but proud people,” Koulouris said, including those who worked on the company’s original landing proposal. said. “The feeling is absolutely great. I’m proud of this team, the whole national team.”

The way to choose Blue Moon

In March 2022, NASA announced lunar development support to support work on a second landing to join SpaceX’s Starship, which the agency selected for the Human Landing System (HLS) program in April 2021. Blue Origin and Dynetics, the two losing bidders in this tender, appealed the decision to the government’s accounting department, but their appeals were dismissed. Blue Origin later sued in Federal Court, but lost the case.

After NASA announced to SLD that this initiative was an attempt to provide competition in the overall HLS effort to address concerns expressed by some members of Congress. “I promised competition, here it is,” Nelson said at the time. SpaceX was excluded from the SLD competition due to the current HLS award, but NASA applied Option B to this award for a second mission to demonstrate the higher performance required for SLD. NASA officially used this option in November at a cost of $1.15 billion, bringing the total cost of the SpaceX HLS operation to over $4 billion.

Following SLD’s December 6 bidding deadline, Blue Origin and Dynetics announced the tender. Blue Origin’s “national team” included Lockheed Martin and Draper, which were part of Blue Origin’s original bid for HLS. Instead, Northrop Grumman, part of the original Blue Origin offering, joined the Dynetics-led team.

Neither Blue Origin nor Dynetics disclosed details of their offerings at the time, but Dynetics did release a picture of the landing craft that looked like a previous design. Both companies received funding from NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Annex N in September 2021 to develop technologies such as engines for landers.

Both SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon will eventually compete for post-Artemis 5 missions under service contracts, a deal similar to what NASA uses for cargo and crew missions to the space station. At the time of the announcement, NASA’s deputy director of research systems development, Jim Free, said that the agency is just beginning to plan how it will acquire landers for future missions.