NASA updates lander plans for Moon landings, finally solves long-festering Orion issue

Blue Moon lunar lander concept of operations.

Credit: NASA

The chart shared by NASA showed Orion docking with the Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit, approximately 8,500 km above the Moon’s surface. However NASA is also working to have the option of docking with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.

According to Jeremy Parsons, the manager of the Artemis Program for NASA, such an orbit a few hundred km above the Moon would significantly reduce the propellant needed by Blue Moon to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up. This mass could be used elsewhere on the vehicle. The lower orbit would also offer more, and faster opportunities for astronauts to get off the lunar surface if needed. In short, it makes some aspects of a lunar landing significantly easier for Blue Origin.

Extended Centaur

As part of this, NASA announced Friday that it is working with United Launch Alliance to develop an “extended” version of the Centaur V upper stage. In concert with the core stage of the Space Launch System, this upper stage would allow Orion to reach low-lunar orbit.

This is a big deal. It has long been a point of embarrassment for NASA that Orion, with its low-performing Service Module, does not have the delta-V capability to launch from Earth, reach low-lunar orbit, and return to Earth for splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. But no one had seemed prepared to fix this problem before.

“Getting Orion to low-Lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long,” Isaacman said Friday.

Instead, NASA created workarounds like the Lunar Gateway, which was put in a near-rectilinear halo orbit that Orion could safely reach. The burden of performance to reach the lunar surface was pushed on to the lunar landers and the companies developing them.

Given the urgency of the situation, NASA has been trying to help lunar lander companies in any way they can, Isaacman said.

“We’re listening to the data, and looking at what’s happening around us,” he said. “What progress are our landing partners making? Where are they struggling? What can we do to be helpful? Their lives get easier if we can get Orion closer to the Moon, substantially. We could choose to continue on our track and say, maybe they’ll show up and meet our timelines. Or we can say well let’s start turning those knobs to help.”