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.
“Blue Moon” is a rather fitting name for a lander that would depend on SLS.
It doesn’t depend on SLS. They’re not stupid.
Bezos said he is going to sell a billion dollars of amazon stock a year to fund his space interests.
Musk’s idea of one ship going from surface to surface will morph to a more reasonable architecture. Each destination will have fully reusable SSTO landers. Blue moon will point us in that direction.
Then we just need a docking ring standard that allows every ship to mate.
I have to agree that a single ship surface to surface is a poor architecture. Having ships specialized for each major operating environment not only allows more efficient ships, leaving the ship for the return leg in orbit saves a great deal of propellant.
So if BO is going all-in on the Moon and cis-lunar (and they are), why are they spending so much time on a brand new methalox engine?
Cis-lunar is all about hydrolox. The BE-3 makes lot of sense in that environment (although I can’t quite understand why RL10’s aren’t dirt-cheap and fully reusable now), but isn’t it a lot easier just to stick with kerolox first stages and have done with it?
I understand why SpaceX is betting on methalox–it’s essential if you’re going all-in on Mars, at least until you start mining water. After that, it seems as if even Mars is more straightforward with hydrolox.
If lunar water mining works out, the solar system runs on hydrolox. End of story, full stop. So why are SpaceX and BO both so hot and bothered about methane?
(Well, I guess there’s that part where the central lunar computer wakes up and realizes that all the water supplies will soon be exhausted, and the only way for the oppressed citizens of Luna to survive is to recruit a few friends to foment a revolution, which leads to them embargoing the water and foodstuffs grown with it…)
I suspect Bezos is more than a little driven by ego and Musk is his target. SpaceX developing a Raptor? BO responds with BE-4. SpaceX grasshopper? “Welcome to the club,” from Bezos. SpaceX is an orbital company? “All first stages are suborbital,” from Bezos.
Bezos can fund BO until he’s dead without ever having to show a profit. Industrial parks in space is an idea from the 1950s. Bezos doesn’t have to know how to get there; he just has to keep spending money. If Musk doesn’t make money, he’s done.
I’m glad to see both of them working in the directions they are. It seems the best possible to me.
Yes, but imagine the bragging rights: “Hey Elon! Having fun trying to go to Mars? I’m King of the Moon!!!
It still seems like there’s a killing to be made for somebody who can hit the specific impulse of an RL10 for half the cost.
“If lunar water mining works out, the solar system runs on hydrolox. End of story, full stop. So why are SpaceX and BO both so hot and bothered about methane?”
And if lunar water mining doesn’t work out? Then BO has experience with Metha/LOX to use. Methane has the nice property that it is the fuel that combines more density than Hydrogen with a lack of carbon deposits in the cooling tubes of the engine. You can make it denser if you super-chill it as well. Denser propellants have advantages for first stages.
Not to be ignored is the point that carbonaceous chondrite asteroids contain water, but also contain much carbon-containing kerogen material (thus the name) for making Methane. Unlike many in Congress, and even Elon Musk, Bezos has emphasized broad development of the Solar System, which I strongly agree with. A multi-nodal Solar System economy will be far easier to make profits from once started. Methane, especially for reusable engines starting at the bottom of deep gravity wells, fits well into such an economy.
If coking is going to be a problem, then methalox probably makes more sense than kerolox for Earth-based first stages. But thrust-to-weight just isn’t that much of a problem anywhere we’re going other than Earth, so the low density of hydrogen doesn’t cause much of a tankage penalty during boost.
As for asteroidal carbon, it’s just not very interesting if not associated with hydrogen. And that’s my point: If you can find hydrogen, you should use it directly. And if you can’t find hydrogen, then you’re in trouble.
I could be convinced that the warmer temperature at which liquid methane is stored could be a deciding factor if you’re trying to store fuel on the surface of something, but all your long-dwell storage is going to be in space, and a sun shade just isn’t that big a deal.
I have a hunch that the odds of lunar water mining not working out are pretty close to the odds of martian water mining not working out. I guess I could sorta-kinda see a martian logistical chain that could use imported liquid hydrogen and stretch it further with methane, but it’s a pretty grim scenario. And again, if you’ve got water, why add carbon to it if you don’t need massive amounts of thrust?
With ACES, will ULA have another tug, depot, lander with each launch? They could quickly build up a fleet of these. If they have a market for the services, it could allow them some price flexibility on launches.
Kinda depends if every second stage is an ACES, or whether they just use vanilla-flavored Centaurs for a lot of them. I think it’s fair to say that they’re going to be propellant-limited, not hardware-limited.
The other thing that factors in here is the level of reusability, and whether you want to try to service them or not. For on-orbit ACES, I suspect they just hit their design life and get sent to a graveyard. But if you’ve got lunar water tankers up and running, it might make sense to send them back to Earth for overhaul–or at least their engines and thrust structures. You can burn up a lot of propellant tanks trying to get a lunar landing system to a safe Earth reentry speed.
Passengers are _always_ next year.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I love ya, tomorrow…
Looking a little further out, nuclear thermal rockets (just on the math, assuming the engineering issues work out) beat chemical rockets on ISP and shortish hydrocarbons actually look pretty good as reaction mass depending on what you think you’re tuning for.