BLUE MOON — USA, 2025?/2029?

Blue Origin showed their first mockup of a lunar lander back in 2017. It was essentially a rocket platform with a flat top that any desired payload could be attached to the top of, with davits to lower rovers and such to the lunar surface. Yes, they want to offer moon landings as a commercial service! It would have weighed fifteen tons with fuel, and had four legs which would fold up to fit into the five meter fairings of other companies’s rockets, so it would not have to be launched on a New Glenn. It had exposed spherical tanks... which led Elon Musk to mockingly nickname it “Blue Balls”. The capacity was to be 4.5 metric tons of cargo at first, later dropped to 3.6, and any capacity to return to orbit would be left to the payload to implement for itself. The basic lander would use a single engine: a new hydrogen-burner called the BE-7, which is quite a bit smaller than the BE-3U that’s used on the second stage of their New Glenn rocket. It runs on a dual expander cycle, where both the hydrogen and the lox are boiled as they cool the engine, and the resulting gas pressure powers the two pumps that inject the gases into the combustion chamber. It is restartable, and supports deep throttling, which is important for soft landings on uncertain terrain. Some time after showing off this lander design, they mentioned that it could be enlarged to make a crewed version, which would have three engines and a capacity of at least 6.5 tons.

This bigger lander idea became part of the “National Team” proposal for a human landing system for the Artemis program. This would have carried a crew capsule and ascent stage built primarily by Lockheed, with its interior and electronics based on the Orion capsule. It was regarded as the front runner in the competition, despite how neither of the other proposals it was up against (the Dynetics ALPACA and the Lunar Starship) would leave big expendable stages behind on the lunar surface. But then Congress cut the budget and only SpaceX bid low enough. The other two both lodged formal protests. Congresspeople started arguing to raise the budget again to restore competition, and others (notably Bernie Sanders) decried this as a “Bezos bailout”. In response, Jeff Bezos offered to defray up to $2 billion of the cost himself, if his lander was chosen — a controversial move that blurred the line between charity and bribery. Blue Origin also formally protested NASA’s selection (as did Dynetics, the lead company of the other losing team), but the Government Accounting Office rejected the appeal. Bezos then sued, because he is an asshole. Once that went nowhere, the National Team seemed to break up, with several individual members starting pursuing other designs.

But some of them, particularly Lockheed, got back together for another try, and since they now had a much less hurried schedule, as they were now making a proposal for Artemis V and beyond instead of for Artemis III, they could now come up with something a lot less half-assed than the mostly-expendable National Team proposal. And they did. This time, the crew cabin is at the bottom of the stack, below the fuel tanks and right next to the three BE-7 rocket nozzles, instead of on top of a tall ladder. And this time the whole thing is reusable as a single piece with no detaching modules. And it won the contract. So officially NASA will only use the Lunar Starship for two flights, but of course we know that once it’s available they’ll find plenty of additional use for it. Having a choice of midsized or large Artemis landers will be a good thing... assuming you’re okay with the idea of the government spending all those billions to attempt to exploit the moon. This new lander uses the “Blue Moon” name, and the original cargo Blue Moon is also getting a substantial revision. The two are now distinguished in name just by calling them Mark 1 and Mark 2.

Blue Origin intends to plunk a Mark 1 cargo lander on the moon in early 2026, and use it to test as much as they can of what will go into the crewed lander. They expect it to have customers other than NASA. For the crewed Mark 2, they are developing a tanker to refuel it in lunar orbit, as it’s too big to launch prefueled. They want this Cislunar Transporter to carry a hundred tons of hydrolox and store it for long periods without any boiloff, which is a challenging goal. NASA is working on this problem in Huntsville (where until recently such work had been blocked by Senator Richard Shelby because he saw it as a threat to the SLS program). Apparently this tanker will be built by Lockheed, but Blue Origin is doing more and more of the lunar stuff in-house now, and I don’t know how much of the design is theirs. The tanker’s main propulsion will consist of three BE-7 engines.

So what does the Blue Moon Mark 1 look like now? Well, it’s a lot taller now than the original mockup was — eight meters high — and for some reason it doesn’t have fold-in legs anymore, which means that it won’t have nearly as wide and safe a stance on rough rocky terrain. In fact, the thing is barely over three meters wide, which is way smaller than it needs to be to fit into even a Vulcan fairing, let alone a New Glenn one. If they don’t fix that, it’ll need smooth and level ground for landing, and that won’t be easy to come by down near the south pole, where it’s expected to be used most often, including on its first mission. They’ve lowered the estimated payload to 3.0 tons, while the fully fueled mass is over 21 tons, making it significantly heftier than the Apollo lunar module despite its more compact outline. It has one BE-7 recessed into its underside, and cannot take off again once it lands. Just as in the original concept, it will be up to the payload to include its own small launcher on top if they want to send anything back up. There isn’t much to go on yet for how the payload area on top, which is a lot higher and narrower than it was in the original concept, will accommodate those who want access to the surface.

The Mark 2 is quite another matter. As mentioned, this is designed to be fully reusable, with no stage left behind on the surface. To accomplish this it will have to make use of the same kind of boiloff prevention that the Cislunar Transporter would need. The planned weight is 45 tons fueled, or maybe more. Even in dry form it would be 16 tons — quadruple the Apollo lunar module’s dry weight. It’ll stand 16 meters tall... and as currently depicted, still won’t have fold-out legs! That’s nuts. Of course, a Lunar Starship without wide legs is even more ridiculously top-heavy.

The Mark 2 can also be set up as a cargo carrier. With the living accommodations omitted, it will be able to take 20 metric tons to the surface per trip, or 30 if it uses all its fuel so it can’t take off again. And if they eventually get fuel production going on the surface (which is the goal that has everyone focusing on the south polar region as a destination, as they hope to be able to find ice and make fuel out of it), then landing with near-empty tanks won’t preclude reuse.

Speaking of in-situ resource utilization, Blue Origin has got one such project to work on: an experimental device to melt lunar regolith and electrolyze it, which they hope will allow them to extract two useful materials: clear glass, and silicon pure enough that it can be made into a solar panel. They call this experiment “Blue Alchemist”.

The process of getting the astronauts down to the surface in this thing has numerous steps, especially for the initial mission where no parts are in lunar orbit yet. First, the Cislunar Transporter is launched by two New Glenns, the first bringing up its propulsion section and the second bringing its big zero-boiloff storage tanks. They get integrated into one long vehicle, and then New Glenn upper stages dock to it to fill those tanks at least two thirds full. It boosts itself out to the orbit of the Gateway station (though the Gateway itself won’t necessarily be present yet). A final New Glenn launches the lander itself out to that orbit, and it docks to the tanker. The tanker fills it up, and then (if the Gateway is present), the lander docks itself there to await the crew. They ride the Artemis SLS out to the Gateway orbit, and when all is ready they get into the lander. It takes them to low lunar orbit and then down to the surface. After many days of work — it’s supposed to support them for up to a month, using fuel cells if there isn’t enough sunlight — they ride it back up to low orbit and then up to the Gateway orbit to dock. They move their stuff into the Orion and ride it back to Earth.

For subsequent missions, one or more New Glenns bring additional fuel for the Cislunar Transporter, which I think requires the tanker to first fly itself back to a fairly low Earth orbit. If it’s really topped up, it has fuel enough for missions where the astronauts, or uncrewed support vessels, can make trips back and forth between the surface and the Gateway without returning to Earth. But such extra trips would be quite limited as long as fuel has to come from Earth, because though the Transporter can hold enough to fill the lander three times, it has to use at least one of those fill-ups to propel itself back to lunar orbit. The lander stays at the Gateway until it’s time to refill it and take it down to the surface again.

It’s not clear how many New Glenn launches it takes to fill up the Cislunar Transporter’s tanks, but for a single landing mission it might be just two, and maxing it out might be doable with three. But if it’s coming back from the Gateway and has been run low, it might not be able to meet them in a convenient orbit, and in that case a given launch might only be able to bring it half as much. This sounds kind of bad, but it’s way better than the Lunar Starship, which might need anywhere from six to fifteen launches per fillup, depending on exactly how much performance they can eke out of the fuel carrier rockets that dock with it, with each launch needing way more fuel than a New Glenn does, and carrying higher risk because the booster has to be caught by the launch tower, so a lost booster may also mean a lost launchpad. On the other hand, each New Glenn flight expends a large upper stage.

And speaking of Starship, as it starts to look increasingly likely that it will not be ready to fulfill its lunar landing role anywhere near on time for Artemis 3, there’s now talk starting to go around about trying to have Blue Moon get ready first — perhaps even sticking a quick and dirty crew cabin onto a Mark 1, with a second one needed to get them back to orbit. To me, getting this ready on time doesn’t sound much more likely than readying the Starship... but apparently Blue Origin is making a very serious proposal to NASA for getting two Artemis 3 astronauts down to the surface and back using one or more “Mark 1.5” landers.

The first Blue Moon Mark 1 “Pathfinder” mission was set to launch in the fall of 2025, but of course delays occurred. It will try to set down in the south polar area. A lot of automated landers have tried such missions in the last several years, and quite a few have either crashed hard, or tripped and fallen over on touchdown. We’ll see soon if this one is capable of staying on its feet... but if it succeeds, that’s just the beginning of showing that the crewed version can do it safely and consistently.