The Artemis Missions They’re not just suggesting getting people going again moon but to have a stable presence on the natural satellite. For this purpose, missions were planned about every two years with a stay on the lunar surface of about 30 days. The first to reach this goal will not be Artemis III before the end of 2025 (although it could slip).
As we know, SpaceX’s Starship-based lunar lander is used for Artemis III and Artemis IV, but NASA wanted to ban another contract to have one second lunar lander with different structure and thus ensure a certain operational redundancy. The result of the call was published today Blue Origin (a company of Jeff Bezos, ex-CEO of Amazon) and the National team that I understood. Deployment is from Artemis V and will also use the moongate, which will be in orbit around the moon.
Blue Origin will build the second lunar lander for Artemis
As in the press conference e in the press release the lander, called Blue Moonhas been completely redesigned compared to the previous announcements and offers higher (though lower) abilities than Starship.
The fixed cost contract (to avoid cost increases during development) has a value of $3.4 billion We envisage design, development but also actual testing with an unmanned demonstration mission lunar surface. All of this must happen before 2029, when the Artemis V mission it should be done.
The previous concept for the lunar lander
Bill Nelson (NASA Administrator) said “Today we are pleased to announce that Blue Origin will become NASA’s second supplier to build a manned landing system to deliver Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface. We are in a golden age of human spaceflight made possible by commercial and international partnerships with NASA.” Together we are investing in the infrastructure that will pave the way for landing the first astronauts on Mars.”.
The National team includes in addition to Blue Origin, as well as Lockheed Martin, Draper, Boeing, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics. As previously written, many features have changed since the first lunar module proposed by Jeff Bezos’ company.
In particular, we find the possibility of a payload of 20 tons (reusable version, to and from lunar orbit) e 30 tons (expendable version that remains on the lunar soil). moon. The height same 16 meters and will work with the liquid oxygen-hydrogen combination, which is being used for the first time in vehicles of this type. Bezos himself he wrote on twitter “orIt struck me that I was on this trip with NASA to land astronauts on the moon, this time to stay there. Together we will solve the boiling problem and make LOX-LH2 a storable propellant combination, thus advancing the state of the art for all space missions.”.
Since the total mass is greater, tanker shuttles must be used, similar to Starship. The missions of Blue Origin lander They will provide low earth orbit to lunar orbit refueling (NRHO, the same used by the Gateway) via a system developed by Lockheed Martin.
The astronauts (four in total) will reach lunar orbit with one SLS rocket and the capsule Orion then to dock moongate. At this point, two astronauts will proceed from the gateway to the lunar lander to reach the surface in the South Pole region.
Lisa Watson Morgan (NASA HLS program), he said “Two different lunar landing designs with different approaches to meet NASA mission requirements provide increased robustness and ensure smooth lunar landings. This competitive approach drives innovation, reduces costs and invests in skills. Commercial to expand business opportunities can serve other customers and foster a lunar economy.”.
