Revised Artemis lunar lander plans take shape
HOUSTON - NASA has provided more details about the revised approaches that Blue Origin and SpaceX are taking to accelerate work on Artemis lunar landers.
At a June 9 event at the Johnson Space Center, NASA announced the crew of the Artemis 3 mission, a test flight in low Earth orbit in which an Orion spacecraft will dock with prototypes of Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX's Starship lunar landers.
NASA plans to use one of those landers on Artemis 4, the first crewed Artemis lunar landing attempt planned for 2028. Last year, the agency directed both companies to develop "acceleration approaches" for their Human Landing System, or HLS, landers, but neither NASA nor the companies had released many details about those concepts.
Sign up for First Up: Get the latest updates on SpaceX, Artemis, NASA and more. From Jeff Foust, First Up is a recap of the day's space industry news, including civil, commercial, and military space developments.
By submitting this form, you agree to the SpaceNews privacy policy and terms and conditions and to receive email from us and our partners. You can opt-out at any time.
The event and subsequent interviews provided more details about those new approaches. For SpaceX, that involves using Starship as both the lunar lander and a translunar injection (TLI) stage.
"We have an updated plan with NASA that includes docking Starship with Orion in Earth orbit instead of NRHO," or near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, said Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, during the event. "Then we use Starship to do the translunar injection with Orion attached."
The combined Starship-Orion stack will travel to low lunar orbit, rather than NRHO, after which Starship will undock for the landing.
"This approach improves crew safety by, first, conducting the critical crew docking event in Earth orbit, just like we're going to practice on Artemis 3," she said. "And the crew can abort off the lunar surface almost any time versus waiting up to days from NRHO."
It also lowers propellant requirements, she added, because of a "more direct route" to the moon, which means fewer launches of propellant tankers needed for the mission. She did not disclose how many tanker launches are now anticipated.
"The big thing in my mind is it eliminated the loiter requirements we had on them in order to rendezvous out in a lunar orbit," said Steve Creech, NASA HLS program manager, in an interview after the crew announcement event. "We had pretty demanding loiter requirements, and so with this, they can stay at their propellant depot until Orion is ready."
That, in turn, reduces the need for unique systems for the HLS version of Starship. "They've been able to get back closer to the Starship fleet design," he said.
The Starship that will be used for the Artemis 3 mission will be a Starship V3 taken "off the line" with the addition of a docking adapter, Jensen said, but with few other systems specific to the lunar lander version, such as a crew cabin.
"With SpaceX, they have demonstrated many of those capabilities continuously on Crew Dragon," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a June 10 social media post, referring to the company's experience with crewed spacecraft systems.
What is more important, he said, are "other controllability tests" of the combined Starship-Orion stack "based on the negative-X axis acceleration that will be necessary when Starship undertakes the TLI burn to the moon with a docked Orion."
For Blue Origin, Creech said the biggest change in its Blue Moon architecture involves replacing a "transporter" spacecraft. The company released details last year about that spacecraft, which would store liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants aggregated in low Earth orbit and transport them to the moon for use by the Blue Moon lander.
Blue Origin is setting aside that transporter. "Now they're using what I call Mark 1-derived transfer stages in lieu of that," he said, a reference to the uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. "That architecture change has eliminated really some of the biggest technology development risks that they had."
Creech noted that the first Blue Moon Mark 2 crewed landing would have been the third landing overall around the end of the decade under the original architecture. Replacing the transporter with the transfer stages is "the big change I would say that allows them to be able to pull back and have an opportunity to fly earlier."
John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said at the crew announcement event that the company was pressing ahead with work on its Blue Moon landers while investigating the New Glenn explosion during a May 28 static-fire test that caused serious damage to the pad. That explosion raised questions about the company's ability to launch its Blue Moon landers for both Artemis 3 and other test flights.
"Manufacturing is well underway on the Artemis 3 Mark 2 lunar crew module" and other lander subsystems, he said. "Our factories are running around-the-clock shifts in a responsible manner."
"We expect to complete the vehicle for Artemis 3 and be ready for launch in 2027," he said. "We've redoubled our efforts and are moving forward."
Thank you for reading the article! Follow us at Google News.
