Lunar Module: The two richest men in the world compete on the lunar surface

On May 19, 2023, NASA announced that it had selected Blue Origin as the contractor for the second manned lunar module of its flagship manned exploration project "Artemis". "Blue Origin" is a private aerospace company founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the former richest man in the world.

According to NASA's announcement, this is a $3.4 billion fixed-amount contract. Blue Origin will lead the development of a fully reusable lunar module, with phased payments based on milestones. This lunar module will be used for manned lunar landings for the first time in the Artemis-5 mission. According to the planned schedule, the mission will be implemented in 2028, and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket will send the Orion spacecraft and four astronauts into lunar orbit. Once the "Orion" docks with the lunar orbital platform portal, the two astronauts will transfer to the "Blue Origin" lunar module, then separate and go to the South Pole region of the moon for about a week of scientific and exploration activities. "Artemis-5" will be a mission in the normalization phase of manned lunar landings, and it will also be a period of transition from short-term lunar surface residence to the lunar base phase. However, based on the current progress, the actual mission will most likely be postponed to around 2029, and the possibility of further postponement is not ruled out.

Rendering of the new version of the lunar module of "Blue Origin"

Lunar Module Contract "Grand and Vengeful"

As we all know, SpaceX's Starship is NASA's current preferred lunar module, which will be used for NASA's first two manned lunar missions, Artemis 3 and 4. Given that there was only one lunar module during the Apollo program, where did Blue Origin's second lunar module contract come from?

This story started two years ago in April 2021, when NASA announced that SpaceX was selected as the sole contractor for the manned lunar module in the Artemis program. SpaceX's design is based on its fully reusable rocket "Starship" that is being developed to create a modified "lunar module" dedicated to lunar landing. In this round of bidding, "Blue Origin" joined forces with "Lockheed Martin", Northrop Grumman Innovations, and Draper to form an all-star "national team" to form the lunar module "national team". This team is full of famous companies and an all-star lineup. It was originally the only choice to win the bid; in addition, there is a "small business team" composed of 25 subcontractors led by Dyn, but SpaceX, which had the most radical plan, was selected, and the industry was in an uproar for a while.

A rendering of the first version of Blue Origin's integrated lander.

SpaceX's unexpected winning of the bid has caused a stir, with different reactions from all parties. In addition to the regrets expressed by relevant members of the U.S. Congress and some organizations, the two losing bidders, led by Blue Origin, expressed dissatisfaction and directly appealed. On April 26, the two losing bidders publicly submitted a 175-page appeal to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), claiming that NASA improperly evaluated all aspects of the two proposals during the bidding process and did not leave them the opportunity to adapt their quotations and bids. On April 30, NASA was forced to suspend the execution of the contract until the GAO made a final ruling.

Three months later, the Accountability Office officially announced the conclusion of the three-month complaint investigation, deeming the two protests invalid, and disclosed some details of the complaint investigation, saying that no evidence of improper bid evaluation was found, and the bid evaluation records were complete and sufficient. Although SpaceX's lunar module program did have the technical risk of too many in-orbit refuelings, the bid evaluation process was legal and compliant. In response to the complainant's claim that it was unreasonable to select only SpaceX as the only winning bidder, the Accountability Office responded that the bidding process did not limit the number of winning companies, and NASA could choose multiple winning bidders or the only winning bidder. In fact, the reason why NASA did not continue to use the plan of selecting two winning bidders and backing up each other in recent years is that the U.S. Congress reduced the $3.2 billion manned lunar module budget to only $850 million in early 2021. NASA was unable to fund two companies to carry out research and development at the same time, so it had no choice but to "go all in" and choose SpaceX.

After the unsuccessful appeal, Blue Origin did not give up. On the one hand, it began to produce various propaganda pictures on social media to publicly criticize the unreasonable design of SpaceX's lunar module, saying that it had many in-orbit refuelings and high technical risks. On the other hand, it used its relationship with the U.S. Congress to put pressure on NASA to issue a second lunar module development contract. For this reason, Bezos even publicly stated that he was willing to pay 2 billion U.S. dollars out of his own pocket to subsidize the development costs in exchange for the contract; and the new director Nelson publicly stated that he would fund the second winning bidder as soon as he took office, but this "wish" did not come true until two years later, and at this time, the "Starship" had already conducted its first unsuccessful orbital test flight. For a contract worth billions of dollars, the above operations are not difficult to understand. However, what is confusing is that in August of that year, Blue Origin suddenly sued NASA, as the "Party A", in the federal court, and insisted in the lawsuit that the bidding was flawed and must be resolved.

A comparison of the Apollo lunar lander and the Constellation, Starship, and Blue Origin lunar modules

As the two companies went to court, the relationship between NASA and Blue Origin was tense. In its statement to the court, NASA said that choosing Blue Origin might prevent the United States from completing its goal of returning to the moon in 2025 in time, and even admitted that its bid "had no chance of winning the bid at all." But in fact, even the fastest-progressing Starship lunar module program is currently unable to complete the arduous task of landing on the moon in 2025. In the end, the lawsuit ended with the withdrawal of the lawsuit and an out-of-court settlement, but it is not difficult to see that NASA's rejection of Blue Origin was not only due to its high price, but also due to concerns about unreasonable technical solutions. After two years, Blue Origin's new plan naturally cannot be launched as it is, and it is bound to make certain improvements in order to be accepted by NASA.

The original design has flaws and many shortcomings.

In the second round of bidding, NASA imposed an exclusive clause on SpaceX, which prohibited it from participating in the bidding. In addition, Boeing was suspected of fraud in the early stage, so only the two teams that failed in the previous round of bidding participated in the actual bidding process. In the previous round of bidding, NASA published a detailed evaluation report and evaluated the pros and cons of the proposals from three aspects: price, technology, and management. In this bidding, no similar evaluation report has been published. However, from the comparison between the old and new versions of the "Blue Origin" plan, it is not difficult to find many drastic improvements.

The 7-meter diameter fairing of the New Glenn during testing will be included in the future Blue Origin lunar module.

In the last round of bidding, the national team's lunar module was named "Integrated Lander Vehicle" (ILV), which consists of three parts: transfer stage, descent stage and ascent stage. The three parts can be launched by "New Glenn" and "Vulcan" launch vehicles respectively, and assembled in the lunar orbit or the lunar orbital platform portal; they can also be launched as a whole by SLS, but this plan has been abandoned due to the high cost and long cycle. The descent stage is derived from the hydrogen-oxygen engine code-named BE-7, which was unveiled by "Blue Origin" in May 2019. The engine has a thrust of 40 kilonewtons and adopts a unique "double expansion combustion cycle". The thrust is adjustable and suitable for reverse landing. The power system and crew cabin of the ascent stage are both responsible for "Lockheed Martin", and the design is to share the system with the Orion spacecraft as much as possible. The transfer stage is responsible for "Northrop Grumman", which also fully refers to the design of its Cygnus cargo spacecraft; Draper is responsible for the development of avionics systems. In general, the "Integrated Lander" has the following disadvantages in the first bidding:

First, the proposal is expensive, with a price of nearly $6 billion, almost twice that of SpaceX's Starship proposal. The industry believes that the proposal includes all costs and profits, which is a traditional project quotation method. The bidder neither considers self-financing nor considers recovering costs through commercial missions or extended missions in the future.

Secondly, the lunar module adopts a partial reuse rather than a full reuse scheme. Among the three parts, the transfer stage is discarded first, and the descent stage is left on the lunar surface after landing, similar to the Apollo lunar module. In the end, only the ascent stage can be docked, refueled and reused at the Gateway, with a reuse rate of only more than 30%. In addition, the three parts of the lunar module need to be launched separately, using three different propulsion systems, and they also need to be assembled in orbit. Any failure in any launch will prevent the lunar module from being assembled in time.

Finally, the subsystem development progress is seriously behind schedule, the key subsystem in-orbit verification time is too late, lack of commercialization and scalability. In addition, the crew module is too high, which is not convenient for astronauts to go down to the lunar surface. Although the lunar module is significantly lower than the Starship, the Starship is equipped with a simple elevator, while the "integrated lander" still uses the Apollo-style external boarding ladder during the initial bidding. Astronauts need to climb several meters in heavy space suits to return to the lunar module.

In May 2019, the "Blue Moon" lunar module was launched at a press conference. The BE-7 engine was at the bottom.

Pay out of pocket to simplify power, fully reuse and boldly seek change

So how did Blue Origin subvert itself on the new version of the lunar module to regain NASA's favor?

The first is to change to a fully reusable mode. The entire lunar module uses a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants. The lunar module is 16 meters high and weighs only 16 tons dry, but it weighs up to 45 tons when filled with propellants. Moreover, the entire lunar module can be stuffed into the 7-meter diameter fairing of the New Glenn rocket. There is no need for on-orbit assembly. The rocket can send the entire lunar module without propellant directly into the lunar orbit.

In response to the issue of over-priced bids, Blue Origin paid out of its own pocket, and the contract amount was reduced to 56.7% of the previous version. According to the commercial development plan, the contractor will have ownership of the developed spacecraft. After completing NASA's established mission, the contractor can use the developed spacecraft to perform tasks such as commercial space travel (moon tour) to make profits or recover funds. In fact, the manned Dragon spacecraft developed by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation according to this model is a typical case. In addition to the rotation mission of the International Space Station, the manned Dragon spacecraft has carried out three commercial space travel missions.

The crew cabin of the lunar module was moved down to the bottom, greatly reducing the astronauts' climbing height. The cabin can support four astronauts to stay on the lunar surface for up to 30 days. The high-gain antenna used for communication was moved to the top of the lunar module. The large tank on the top of the lunar module is used to store liquid hydrogen with the lowest density. The panel on the side is a radiator, which is said to also serve as a sunshade to inhibit the evaporation of propellant. The smaller tank below is used to store liquid oxygen, and the docking port is set on the left and right sides of the bottom crew cabin.

In response to the complexity of the propulsion system, the power system of the lunar module has been simplified to use only the BE-7 engine. At the same time, Blue Origin claims that it has made some progress in engine development and testing, and the technology is more mature and reliable than the last bid. At the same time, other subcontractors such as Draper (avionics) and Boeing (docking system) have also started research and development of other subsystems.

The full-scale model of the first version of the lunar module of "Blue Origin", showing that its crew module is located at a higher position

In addition, the most critical source of cryogenic propellant will be developed by Lockheed Martin in a spacecraft called the Cislunartransporter, which will be refueled in low-Earth orbit and then go to the moon to transfer the propellant to the Blue Origin lunar module. The spacecraft can then return to low-Earth orbit to continue replenishing propellant in preparation for the next mission. The entire lander and propellant transfer spacecraft are designed to be fully reusable, which is close to Starship. According to the plan, Blue Origin plans to use the Mark 2 version of the lunar module to perform an unmanned lunar demonstration mission before the Artemis-5 mission.

From the Earth to the Moon

Can commercial lunar landers continue to be successful?

In recent years, a series of commercial space research and development projects advocated by NASA have achieved fruitful results, and the progress and funding of the projects have been reasonably controlled. First, the "Commercial Cargo Services Project" in 2008 was hailed as the beginning of commercial space procurement, which gave birth to two cargo spacecraft, the Dragon and Cygnus, as well as two launch vehicles, the Falcon 9 and Antares. Subsequently, NASA proposed the "Commercial Manned Spaceflight Project", which gave birth to two manned spacecraft, the Crew Dragon and the Starliner. However, for various reasons, the Boeing spacecraft has not yet made its first manned flight, but the normal operation of the "Crew Dragon" has highlighted the wisdom of the double insurance strategy.

Afterwards, the success in low-Earth orbit encouraged NASA to push this model into deep space, and in the subsequent Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) project, it continued to use a commercial model to purchase its core module. Eventually, this model of commercial bidding, fixed procurement, milestone payments, and free use continued to the bidding for the lunar module. NASA said that if both lunar modules can be put into service as scheduled, the project will be a huge success. Because NASA estimates that the total development cost of the Starship and the Blue Origin lunar module may be as high as $20 billion, NASA only paid about one-third of the cost to obtain these two lunar modules.

Although the contract has been won, the Blue Origin lunar module is not sitting back and relax. As we all know, liquid hydrogen propellant must be kept at a temperature close to absolute zero to prevent it from boiling. Also, due to its small molecular weight, it is easy to leak, which leads to demanding sealing requirements, and it can also cause problems such as hydrogen embrittlement. It is not an exaggeration to call it the most difficult propellant for humans to "serve" at this stage, especially in space, where direct sunlight causes huge changes in the thermal environment. Usually, rockets and upper stages using liquid hydrogen need to complete all launch activities within a day or less, while the Blue Origin lunar module needs to store liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in orbit for a long time. Although the company has long been committed to making liquid hydrogen a "storable" propellant, it is still an extremely challenging technology, which is much more difficult than the on-orbit storage of methane for Starship.

Despite this, NASA still publicly believes that the two lunar modules fully utilize the technical reserves of the US aerospace industry to meet mission requirements and provide more robustness. The two lunar modules can also back up each other, support regular lunar landings, and further stimulate the Earth-Moon economy, but do not prepare for future Mars missions. (Author: Tian Feng)

This article originally appeared in Space Exploration magazine, issue 7, 2023