Blue Origin group gives NASA moon lander mockup
NASA’s future moon landing dreams became a little more tangible this week as one of the three commercial company efforts to make the next lunar lander rolled out a mockup for the space agency.
Known as the National Team, led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, but partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, the group put together a full-size engineering model of its Human Landing System’s crew lander vehicle.
The model standing at 40 feet tall and now housed at Johnson Space Center’s Space Vehicle Mockup Facility has two of the spacecraft design’s major elements, the Ascent Element and Descent Element.
The National Team is competing with SpaceX’s Starship as well as the company Dynetics to become NASA’s choice for lunar landers for its Artemis missions as it aims to return humans to the moon by
2024.
The mockup is part of the delivery schedule all three companies are under when NASA handed out the contracts this past April worth $967 million awarded under the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships program.
NASA will now work with the National Team to prove out its design for getting crew, equipment, supplies, and samples on and off the vehicle.
“Testing this engineering mockup for crew interaction is a step toward making this historic mission real,” said Brent Sherwood, vice president of Advanced Development Programs for Blue Origin in a press release. “The learning we get from full-scale mockups can’t be done any other way. Benefiting from NASA’s expertise and feedback at this early stage allows us to develop a safe commercial system that meets the agency’s needs.”
Blue Origin had already announced last year a design now three years in the making for a proposed commercial Blue Moon lander, and that design is similarly incorporated into this pitch to NASA as part of a threestage spacecraft.
That spacecraft design features the Integrated Lander Vehicle to get to and from the lunar surface in a similar manner to how the
Apollo landings occurred. Northrop Grumman’s contribution based on its Cygnus module used on missions to the International Space Station will descend the lander into an orbit around the moon.
Blue Origin will then use engines to make the final descent to the surface while Lockheed Martin’s contribution, which includes the crew cabin, will launch it back into space.
Draper provides descent guidance and avionics.
The three assets can launch on either Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets or United Launch Alliance Vulcan rockets, both expected to debut in 2021, or a complete version could launch on NASA’s Space Launch System rockets.
Artemis missions will use NASA’s SLS rocket and Orion capsule to take off from Kennedy Space Center and enter lunar orbit. That along with the Gateway space station are part of NASA’s long-term plans to send humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972 and eventually to be able to explore farther destinations including Mars.
The National Team’s proposal would allow the vehicle to dock with either Orion or Gateway.
“Each partner brings its own outstanding legacy to the National Team. These include developing, integrating, and operating human-rated spacecraft, launch systems and planetary landers. Together we form an excellent team to send our next astronauts to the moon in 2024,” said Kirk Shireman, vice president of Lunar Campaigns at Lockheed Martin Space in the press release. “Augmenting state of the art tools with physically being able to see, interact, and evaluate a fullup lander in person is critical. It will inform our design and requirements earlier in the program allowing us to accelerate our development and meet the 2024 lunar landing goal.”
Plans are for the mockup to remain at Johnson Space Center through early 2021 for tests and simulation.
NASA’s contracts among the three commercial groups are fixed-cost contracts for 10 months of development with NASA personnel working alongside. The three will come back in February.