The private sector continues to seize the initiative in space:
Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.”
Last year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company’s West Texas facility.
That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin’s feather symbol.
The company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon’s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the “water ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater’s deep crevices.”
Water is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.
If this happens, SLS/Orion are dead programs walking. This is the 21st century I’ve been waiting for. We’re finally putting a stake through the heart of the Apollo Cargo Cult.
Note (as usual with such pieces in such venues) the stupidity and ignorance of the comments.
[Update a few minutes later]
Eric Berger thinks this is a big deal. So do I. I think that people are going to be very surprised at how quickly things start happening. And I suspect that 2017 will be viewed as a very important year in space history.
[Update late morning]
Miri Kramer thinks it’s “unhinged sounding.” I think that applies better to NASA sending crew to the moon on the very first flight of SLS. Even in Apollo they had test flights of the launch system.
[Update early afternoon]
Let the space tycoons lead the way. I think the transcontinental railroad analogy is very apt. NASA’s (and the National Research Council’s) “vision,” such as it is, is indeed paltry, as I wrote last year.
You can call this article Blue Moon
But in deference to my late friend Pat F. I’ll always think of Jeff Bezo’s proposal as: Amazons Of The Moon.
Heh. And we have today’s internet winner.
On a more serious note, there is no way I would denigrate this proposal, just because it’s from Bezos. Blue Origin has a serious track record and not a bad one for where they are. They are probably in as good a position as anyone to develop a lunar lander. It’s not like Northrop/Grumman have any left over LM’s laying about ready to launch…
The other failure of vision over at the commentary in the Washington Post peanut gallery, is the fact that having the CEO of a delivery logistics company is the ideal expertise to have when developing a cargo delivery system to the moon. I don’t expect my packages to be delivered to my door by NASA… What is it with the space cult?
Life imitates Futurama.
Remember the Futurama episode where they made fun of people who bought Amazon stock?
The other failure of vision over at the commentary in the Washington Post peanut gallery, is the fact that having the CEO of a delivery logistics company is the ideal expertise to have when developing a cargo delivery system to the moon.
I wouldn’t consider it ideal, but it is at least someone who has experience with global scale logistics, working in a different area which is potentially also logistics-heavy. Some of that knowledge would carry over.
Is it going to be a blue, white or grey lander? With mars we know the color!!! Silly lunatics.
You do know that Bezos will only do this as a partner of NASA and contemplates using the SLS as one of the launch vehicles for Blue Moon?
I know that he’ll try to do that. I don’t know that he’ll only do it that way.
I think he’s just trying to play nice,
Nothing like a circumlunar mission to make folks forget about the ITS tank rupture,
I like SLS just fine thank you.
I don’t care about ITS, but I’d put money on Falcon Heavy and Dragon repeating Apollo 8 before NASA does, and at a tiny fraction of the cost.
It’s a competently designed rocket on all evidence.
Too bad it’s way too expensive for NASA to operate,
No need for anyone to forget about the ITS tank rupture. Rupturing the tank was always the intent of the test. That’s why it was done at sea on an unmanned barge. Cheaper than building a huge shrapnel containment structure on land (the ITS test article propellant tank was the size of a small building).
The hard-core Muskophobes have been trying their best to sell this routine test-to-destruction as some kind of major setback for SpaceX. Sorry kiddies, this ain’t remotely like Scaled Composites blowing up an NO2 tank and killing three people.
As a self-admitted SLS fan, you may or may not be interested to know that at least some of the engineering test components for SLS now being built at Michoud are destined for the same sort of fate as SpaceX’s big black tank. Tests to destruction are a routine part of aerospace vehicle development.
Hydrogen? Surely he meant hydrazine. I mean, he’s not some kind of dangerous freethinker.
Ummmm… while the New Shepard launcher might indeed make for an interesting basis for a lunar lander, the issue of hydrogen (plus Lox) is significant; keeping them cold (and preventing boiloff) is no easy task, both in space and on the moon. That’s why so many lander designs (including Apollo’s) use hypergolics, low ISP and all.
ULA and Masten are proposing a cryo lander. ACES is a cryo system that lives in space. Boil off is handled by refueling, and using it for power.
Elon talks about the forcing function. If the govt. put a fully reusable lander in lunar orbit… that would be a forcing function and at much lower cost than what they’re doing now.
OK, Blue Origin wants to fly their New Shepard on another launcher, essentially making it a second stage, or would it be a third stage?
Their New Glenn — ugh what horrible names — will be reusable, the SLS not so reusable, and the FH will be reusable. What none of these launchers have is a reusable second stage. Would pairing the New Shapard with FH or New Glenn mean full reusability or is there some technical restraint that prevents this?
Has Bezos been trolling everyone by making them think he was working on a suborbital vehicle when he was really just tackling the problem of full reusability from a different direction?
The development choices of SpaceX and Blue Origin will make for a great case study one day.
Personally, I think naming spacecraft after brave space pioneers ought to be de rigeur. The Greco-Roman pantheon is getting pretty well picked-over IMHO.
On a note of personal sentiment, I think it would be dandy if Annie Glenn was still around and could attend New Glenn’s first launch when it occurs.
I have suspected for a while that Bezos may ultimately have more staying power than Musk. It is not unlike the first wave of space exploitation, when the Hughes company was a pioneer. Hughes always had the backing of his personal cash cow, the Hughes Tool Company, to secure him in lean times. Bezos has Amazon. Musk, as far as I know, has no visible means of support.
Amazon isn’t really much of a cash cow. It’s mainly a retailer and retail company profit margins have never, historically, been very large. Amazon’s other significant business is cloud computing services. It has significant competitors in both cloud services and retail.
A lot of Hughes Tool’s “cash cow-ness” was due to its patented intellectual property. Amazon, Lord knows, has tried its level best to develop a portfolio of valuable patents but isn’t notable for having succeeded to any great degree. Its debacle involving that comic opera attempt to patent at-sea barge landings of booster stages comes readily to mind.
Assuming Falcon 9’s teething problems are behind it, SpaceX is perfectly capable of being a considerable cash cow in its own right. And then there are the two huge LEO comsat constellations SpaceX intends to field in a few years. The margin on global broadband services may not compare with the margin on launches, but the total size of the latter market sector is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the former. Quantity has a quality all its own as the late Uncle Joe Stalin once said.
I don’t foresee Elon Musk having to rattle any tin cups.