블루 오리진, 뉴 글렌 폭발 aftermath에서 달 착륙선 개발 계속

TOKYO — Blue Origin is continuing to develop its Blue Moon lunar landers, with seven vehicles in production, while recovering from the New Glenn pad explosion more than a month ago. In a talk at the Spacetide conference here July 6, John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said the company’s work on its Blue Moon Mark 1 uncrewed lander and Mark 2 crewed lander has not been interrupted by the investigation into and recovery from the May 28 pad explosion that destroyed a New Glenn rocket and key infrastructure at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36. “We are continuing that effort in Blue Origin while we return to flight with New Glenn,” he said. “We have not slowed down.” That includes four Mark 1 landers in various stages of production. The first, designated serial number 1 and named Endurance, was scheduled to launch later this year before the New Glenn explosion. Couluris said the company was wrapping up testing of the lander before putting it into “quiescent operations” while awaiting a launch now expected in the first quarter of 2027. A second Mark 1 lander is being built to carry NASA’s VIPER robotic rover for launch later in 2027. He said the company has started work on two more Mark 1 landers to carry the Lunar Terrain Vehicle rovers being built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost under NASA awards announced May 26. Those landers are scheduled to launch in 2028. Blue Origin is also working on three Mark 2 landers. One is a prototype that will launch to low Earth orbit in 2027 as part of the revised Artemis 3 mission, with NASA’s Orion spacecraft docking with it. It will use the same crew module as later Mark 2 landers, but without a full propulsion system. “We leaned forward and started building this vehicle as soon as the NASA administrator offered that the pivot of this mission would happen,” he said of Artemis 3. The company is also working on two vehicles for what it calls the Mark 2 Alpha lander that will be used for crewed landings. One will fly an uncrewed landing demonstration mission in 2028, followed by a crewed landing. “This lander is now optimized for the orbits that we’ve worked with NASA on,” he said. He did not disclose those orbits, but they would be a shift from the near-rectilinear halo orbit originally planned when the lander and Orion would rendezvous at the lunar Gateway. “Now that we’re not going to a Gateway orbit, you can see this lander looks a little different than what we’ve shown in the past,” he said. “The reason for that is to optimize performance to and from that lunar orbit.” New Glenn update Couluris also used the presentation to provide additional details about Blue Origin’s recovery from the New Glenn pad explosion. The company outlined June 30 an alternative concept of operations, or conops, for moving the vehicle from an integration building to the pad that eliminates the need to replace the transporter-erector destroyed in the explosion. He emphasized the company is working qu…