Lunar lander unveiled as NASA puts finishing touches on plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2024
Blue Origin plans to build and launch a commercially developed lunar lander, a spacecraft capable of carrying scientific payloads and astronauts to landings on the moon by 2024, the Trump administration’s stated goal for near-term space exploration, Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos announced Thursday.
„This is an incredible vehicle,“ he told a throng of space reporters, current and former NASA managers, engineers and astronauts. „And it’s going to the moon.“
Secretly under development for the past three years, Bezos said the „Blue Moon“ lander, using a powerful new hydrogen-powered engine generating up to 10,000 pounds of thrust, will be capable of landing up to 6.5 metric tons of equipment on the lunar surface.
Equipped with gigabit-bandwidth optical communications gear, star trackers enabling autonomous navigation and terrain-mapping LIDAR systems, he said Blue Moon can safely touch down within 75 feet of a given target on slopes up to 15 degrees. Electrical power will be provided by fuel cells instead of solar panels, allowing the spacecraft to operate throughout cold, two-week-long lunar nights.
Payloads will be carried on the lander’s upper deck and lowered to the surface by davits much like lifeboats from an ocean liner. Bezos said the Blue Moon could be equipped with larger propellant tanks and other systems, allowing it to carry astronauts to the lunar surfaces in an ascent vehicle mounted on the lander’s upper deck. He did not discuss whether Blue Origin might also build such an ascent spacecraft.
„This is Blue Moon,“ Bezos said. „We’ve been working on this lander for three years, it’s a very large lander, it’ll soft land in a precise way, 3.6 metric tons onto the lunar surface. The stretched-tank variant of it will soft land 6.5 metric tons onto the lunar surface.“
The timing of Bezos announcement came as NASA works through the final stages of hammering out details and cost estimates to enable astronaut „boots on the moon“ by 2024, a goal laid out by Vice President Mike Pence during a March 27 speech at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
In an interview with CBS News earlier Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said one of the most difficult hurdles for meeting the 2024 challenge is development of a lander.
„The most significant piece is gonna be the landing capability,“ he said.
