Blue Origin has revealed new details about its development of the Artemis lunar lander, including a transporter vehicle that will support its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander. The company’s senior vice president of lunar permanence, John Couluris, showed off an illustration of the “transporter” vehicle at the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium meeting.
The transporter is designed to aggregate liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant in Earth orbit and transport it to a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. The vehicle will be launched into low Earth orbit on a New Glenn rocket and fueled using excess propellant from upper stages.
Couluris highlighted several key technologies, including “zero-boiloff” technology to prevent losses of cryogenic propellants. The company has made significant progress in this area, maintaining liquid hydrogen at 20 kelvins (-20 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) and liquid oxygen at 90 kelvins.
The transporter can carry around 100 metric tons from Earth orbit to lunar orbit and will be used for a variety of applications beyond the moon. Blue Origin plans to conduct both an uncrewed test landing of Blue Moon Mark 2 as well as a crewed landing before the end of the decade.
In addition to the transporter, Blue Origin is also working on the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, a robotic lander capable of placing up to three metric tons on the lunar surface. The company received a task order through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to fly a camera payload on this mission.
Source: https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-updates-work-on-transporter-for-blue-moon-lunar-lander