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A rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander that shall be a part of NASA’s Artemis program. | Source: Blue Origin
NASA has awarded Blue Origin, the sub-orbital spaceflight firm based by Jeff Bezos, with a NextSTEP-2 Appendix P Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) contract. Under the contract, the corporate will develop a human touchdown system for NASA’s Artemis V mission to the Moon.
Blue Origin will work with its National Team, which incorporates Lockheed Martin, Draper, Boeing, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics, which the corporate acquired in January 2022, to develop and fly a lunar lander that may make a precision touchdown wherever on the Moon’s floor and a cislunar transporter.
During the Artemis V mission, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will launch 4 astronauts into lunar orbit aboard the Orion Spacecraft. Once Orion docks, two astronauts will switch to Blue Origin’s human touchdown system for a weeklong journey to the Moon’s South Pole area.
“Today we are excited to announce Blue Origin will build a human landing system as NASA’s second provider to deliver Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson mentioned. “We are in a golden age of human spaceflight, which is made possible by NASA’s commercial and international partnerships. Together, we are making an investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first astronauts on Mars.”
Blue Origin plans to make use of LOX-LH2, a mix of liquid hydrogen gas and liquid oxygen oxidizer, to energy the lander and transporter. LOX-LH2 will create a high-specific impulse that gives a dramatic benefit for high-energy deep area missions.
Typically, builders have used lower-performing however extra simply storable propellants, like hydrazine and nitrogen teroxide, for these sorts of missions as a result of problematic boil-off of LOX-LH2 throughout lengthy mission timelines.
To fight this, Blue Origin hopes to make high-performance LOX-LH2 a storable propellant mixture. The firm plans to develop and fly solar-powered 20-degree Kelvin cryocoolers and different applied sciences to forestall LOX-LH2 boil-off.
Blue Origin has excessive hopes for the position that LOX-LH2 can have in the way forward for area journey, significantly for future missions past the moon. The firm additionally thinks that storable LH2 will profit enabling capabilities like high-performance nuclear thermal propulsion.
Additionally, Blue Origin is getting ready for a future when lunar ice can be utilized to fabricate LOX and LH2 propellents on the Moon.