…with lunar and Mars regolith simulants.

If Congress and NASA were serious about opening space to humanity, this is the sort of thing that NASA would be spending more money on, instead of a monster rocket.

[Update a while later]

Related, I think: Questions that the Trump transition team asked NASA.

If, like me, you couldn’t make it to Colorado Springs last week, Calla Cofield has highlights.

[Noon update]

Valerie Insinna has the story on Tory’s choice in engines. Aerojet Rocketdyne has to have fingers crossed in the hope that BE-4 testing doesn’t go well.

They’re working on a lunar lander:

Blue Origin would be willing to invest in development of the Blue Moon system as part of a partnership with NASA, Meyerson said, envisioning regular delivery of resources and supplies to a potential lunar colony to augment NASA missions launched by the agency’s own Space Launch System.

“The more NASA flies SLS, the more they will need commercial logistics delivery services,” he said. “New Glenn and Blue Origin and Blue Moon compliment SLS and Orion, enabling NASA’s return to the moon, and this time to stay.”

NASA’s current human spaceflight plans do not include human missions to the lunar surface. Instead, NASA has outlined an an architecture that calls for the development of a human-tended facility in cislunar space, called the Deep Space Gateway, by the mid-2020s intended to support testing of technologies needed for human missions to Mars in the 2030s.

Congress doesn’t really want NASA to do anything except build a giant rocket that hardly ever flies, but Meyerson is being politically correct.

[Update a while later]

ULA has a nice video of their vision for the future.

[Update Friday morning]

Eric Berger talked to Rob Meyerson about Blue Origin’s plans. They’ll be flying again this summer. Passengers next year.