HOUSTON \u2014 NASA has provided more details about the revised approaches that Blue Origin and SpaceX are taking to accelerate work on Artemis lunar landers.<\/p>\n
At a June 9 event at the Johnson Space Center, NASA announced the crew of the Artemis 3 mission<\/a>, a test flight in low Earth orbit in which an Orion spacecraft will dock with prototypes of Blue Origin\u2019s Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX\u2019s Starship lunar landers.<\/p>\n NASA plans to use one of those landers on Artemis 4, the first crewed Artemis lunar landing attempt planned for 2028. Last year, the agency directed both companies to develop \u201cacceleration approaches\u201d for their Human Landing System, or HLS, landers<\/a>, but neither NASA nor the companies had released many details about those concepts.<\/p>\n The event and subsequent interviews provided more details about those new approaches. For SpaceX, that involves using Starship as both the lunar lander and a translunar injection (TLI) stage.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have an updated plan with NASA that includes docking Starship with Orion in Earth orbit instead of NRHO,\u201d or near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, said Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, during the event. \u201cThen we use Starship to do the translunar injection with Orion attached.\u201d<\/p>\n The combined Starship-Orion stack will travel to low lunar orbit, rather than NRHO, after which Starship will undock for the landing.<\/p>\n \u201cThis approach improves crew safety by, first, conducting the critical crew docking event in Earth orbit, just like we\u2019re going to practice on Artemis 3,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the crew can abort off the lunar surface almost any time versus waiting up to days from NRHO.\u201d<\/p>\n It also lowers propellant requirements, she added, because of a \u201cmore direct route\u201d to the moon, which means fewer launches of propellant tankers needed for the mission. She did not disclose how many tanker launches are now anticipated.<\/p>\n \u201cThe big thing in my mind is it eliminated the loiter requirements we had on them in order to rendezvous out in a lunar orbit,\u201d said Steve Creech, NASA HLS program manager, in an interview after the crew announcement event. \u201cWe had pretty demanding loiter requirements, and so with this, they can stay at their propellant depot until Orion is ready.\u201d<\/p>\n That, in turn, reduces the need for unique systems for the HLS version of Starship. \u201cThey\u2019ve been able to get back closer to the Starship fleet design,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The Starship that will be used for the Artemis 3 mission will be a Starship V3 taken \u201coff the line\u201d with the addition of a docking adapter, Jensen said, but with few other systems specific to the lunar lander version, such as a crew cabin.<\/p>\n \u201cWith SpaceX, they have demonstrated many of those capabilities continuously on Crew Dragon,\u201d NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a June 10 social media post<\/a>, referring to the company\u2019s experience with crewed spacecraft systems.<\/p>\n What is more important, he said, are \u201cother controllability tests\u201d of the combined Starship-Orion stack \u201cbased on the negative-X axis acceleration that will be necessary when Starship undertakes the TLI burn to the moon with a docked Orion.\u201d<\/p>\n