Blue Moon lander unveiled, when will it fly to the moon?

Recently, NASA Administrator Nelson visited Blue Origin, and the company took the opportunity to unveil a full-scale model of the cargo version of the Blue Moon lunar lander. This cargo lander is called "Blue Moon MK1", which will verify a series of key technologies for the Blue Moon MK2 manned lander. However, the time when the Blue Moon lander will fly to the moon has not yet been announced, and the time node for manned lunar landing is even more worrying.

Strong cargo capacity

Blue Origin, the favorite of super-rich Bezos, is second only to SpaceX in terms of technical strength among commercial aerospace companies. Bezos also used his connections to actively lobby for a win in NASA's manned lunar lander bidding, and in May 2023, he defeated his competitors and won NASA's second round of manned lunar lander contracts.

Blue Moon MK1 lander rendering

It is no coincidence that the Blue Moon lander received the contract from NASA. It is a very advanced high-performance lunar lander. Although there is only a full-scale model of the cargo version now, the technical performance of the Blue Moon MK1 lander is quite amazing. According to Blue Origin, the Blue Moon MK1 lander will be launched in the future using the New Glenn rocket that the company is developing. The Blue Moon MK1 lander only needs to be launched with a single New Glenn rocket. It benefits from the New Glenn rocket's large fairing with a diameter of 7 meters and a length of 21.9 meters, as well as its huge capacity of 45 tons in low-Earth orbit.

The Blue Moon MK1 is much larger and heavier than existing landers, and its performance is also very strong. The Blue Moon lander uses high-performance liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants, coupled with the high-specific impulse BE-7 hydrogen-oxygen engine, and its carrying capacity is naturally excellent. The Blue Origin company's official website proudly mentions that the Blue Moon MK1 lander has the ability to transport up to 3 tons of cargo to any location on the lunar surface.

The 3-ton cargo data looks bland, but the horizontal comparison is quite amazing. India's Chandrayaan-3 lander, which successfully landed on the moon not long ago, weighed only about 1.75 tons. As for the small and medium-sized landers under the U.S. Commercial Lunar Payload Service Project, the cargo capacity is even more appalling. The Polar Exploration Rover lunar rover that the United States is preparing to launch in 2024 weighs only 430 kilograms, and the large Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance weigh only about 1 ton. If only the mass factor is considered, the Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander can send 7 Polar Exploration Rover lunar rovers to the lunar surface. Even considering the constraints of the payload volume, it can transport a lunar rover that is much larger than Curiosity. It will also be used to transport various logistical supplies, infrastructure for lunar scientific research stations and bases, and various scientific research payloads, greatly enhancing the United States' lunar scientific research capabilities.

High performance critical systems

The Blue Moon MK1 lander is also technically remarkable. Blue Origin said that the first Blue Moon MK1 lander is numbered MK1-SN001, which will be a pure demonstration mission. Starting from the SN002 mission, the lander will carry customer payloads to provide commercial cargo services.

The MK1-SN001 mission will conduct actual verification of the Blue Moon lander's key subsystems - the BE-7 hydrogen-oxygen engine, cryogenic propellant management, flight control electronic equipment, and communication and navigation control systems, to demonstrate the reliability of these key subsystems and the feasibility of the lander's overall design, as well as verify the ability to accurately land on the moon within 100 meters.

Blue Origin is developing an advanced, high-performance BE-7 hydrogen-oxygen engine. It uses 3D printing/additive manufacturing technology, a double expansion cycle to deliver hydrogen-oxygen propellant, and a vacuum thrust of approximately 4.54 tons. The overall design of the engine is very simple, and it has a vacuum specific impulse of 453 seconds, which is the basis for the powerful carrying capacity of the Blue Moon lander.

To achieve precise landing, Blue Origin is also developing a terrain positioning system using lidar. The landing system will be tested during the New Shepard's routine suborbital flight and then tested on the Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander. Blue Origin said that the precise soft landing system under development can reduce the landing accuracy deviation to single digits.

It is no exaggeration to say that once the Blue Moon MK1 lander becomes a reality, the United States' unmanned lunar exploration capabilities will be greatly improved. "Blue Moon MK1" is only an unmanned cargo lander, and the Blue Moon MK2 lander has stronger performance. It uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant on-orbit replenishment technology extremely aggressively, uses multiple BE-7 engines, and has the ability to send four astronauts to the lunar surface and support their activities for up to one month. "Blue Moon MK2" will also have a cargo version, with a maximum capacity of 20 tons when reused, and 30 tons when used once, with the ability to transport a 20-ton lunar habitat and build a lunar base.

When will the moon-flying trip take place?

The Blue Moon lander introduced by Blue Origin is advanced and powerful, and can meet the needs of the US space industry from unmanned lunar exploration in the near term, manned lunar landing in the medium term, to the construction of a lunar base in the long term. I walked a lot in my dream, but when I woke up, I was still lying in bed. Judging from the development history of Blue Origin and the Blue Moon lander, the Blue Moon lander still has a long way to go before the dream comes true.

NASA chief visits Blue Moon lander mockup

First of all, the development history of the Blue Moon lander does not make us optimistic. "Blue Moon" is not a new concept proposed after the launch of the Artemis program. As early as 2016, Blue Origin ambitiously proposed the concept of the Blue Moon lander, and the Blue Moon project was officially announced to the public in 2017. The earliest Blue Moon lander has the ability to deliver 4.5 tons of payload to the lunar surface, and it is claimed that it will make its first lunar landing in 2020.

As the United States launched its manned lunar landing program, Blue Origin vigorously promoted the Blue Moon lander. It first displayed the Blue Moon model in May 2019 and advertised that it has the ability to deliver 6.5 tons of payload to the moon. The enhanced manned and cargo landers have stronger performance.

In October 2019, Blue Origin took the lead and formed a "national team" with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to compete for the manned lander of the Artemis program with a three-module lunar lander design. This design is completely different from the earlier Blue Moon lander and lost to the lunar version of Starship in the bidding. After some political operations, Blue Origin regained the opportunity to bid.

In 2023, Blue Origin got the contract and made a comeback. This time, the design of the Blue Moon lander is very different from the past. The Blue Moon lander has been repeatedly changed and the current display is only a physical model, not the real lander in assembly. Considering that a lot of testing is required after the assembly is completed, the development progress of "Blue Moon" is not optimistic.

In addition, there are many technical obstacles for the Blue Moon lander to head to the moon. The first is the New Glenn rocket as a "mount". The New Glenn rocket was originally scheduled to make its first flight in 2020, but now it has been changed to 2024 after three postponements, and the possibility of further postponement is not ruled out. The development progress of the Blue Moon lander is a bigger problem. The BE-7 hydrogen-oxygen engine, as the core power of the "Blue Moon", has accumulated more than 4,000 seconds of hot test by the end of March this year. Compared with other upper-stage hydrogen-oxygen engines, more tests are still needed to verify its reliability. The flight control and orbit attitude control systems of Blue Moon, as well as precision landing technology, also need to be developed as soon as possible. According to a report in Aviation Weekly in October this year, the first mission of the Blue Moon MK1 lander has been postponed from 2024 to no earlier than 2026. Considering that the development time nodes of Blue Origin have always been delayed and unreliable, it is unlikely that Blue Moon MK1-SN001 will fly to the moon within 3 years.

In the Artemis program schedule, the Artemis 5 mission in 2029 will use the Blue Moon MK2 lander, and the unmanned lunar landing demonstration of "Blue Moon MK2" should be in 2027. The Blue Moon MK2 lander is not only larger in size, but also requires in-orbit refueling of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants. At present, it is already very difficult to refuel liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen on the ground, and it is even more difficult to refuel large amounts of hydrogen and oxygen propellants in orbit. It is hard to imagine that the Blue Moon MK2 lander can demonstrate the moon landing in 2027, let alone a manned moon landing in 2029. It is already a very optimistic expectation that the Blue Moon MK2 lander will be able to carry out a manned moon landing mission 10 years later. (Author: Zhang Xuesong, Image source: Blue Origin, Gatekeeper: Jiang Fan, Deputy Director of the Science and Technology Committee of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation)