New Glenn forced an explosive rewrite for NASA’s plans to build a moon base

NASA unveiled plans in March to develop a lunar base as part of its “Ignition” event that outlined the agency’s new direction in human spaceflight. The plans, though, were rather notional: a three-phase effort to set up a base in the south polar region of the moon spanning more than a decade and costing more than $30 billion. There were few specifics about missions, including who would launch what and when. NASA began filling in those details at a May 26 briefing at NASA Headquarters. The agency selected Astrolab and Lunar Outpost to develop lunar rovers, smaller versions of the concepts those companies, along with Intuitive Machines, proposed to NASA last year in the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program. Those rovers would be delivered on separate Blue Moon Mark 1 landers in 2028 under a Commercial Lunar Payload Services task order. NASA also selected Firefly Aerospace to transport to the moon several MoonFall drone-like spacecraft, which will hop across the lunar surface scouting potential sites for a lunar base. The contracts had a combined value of nearly $1 billion. “America is returning to the moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced. “We are working alongside our many international and commercial partners to leverage the incredible capabilities from [the] commercial industry to build a moon base.” NASA did not discuss why it selected the companies for these missions. It was, though, a big win for both Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, startups that bet their futures on winning LTV awards. It was also a major setback for Intuitive Machines, which won neither an LTV contract nor a lander mission. However, perhaps the biggest winner was Blue Origin.Less than two years ago, NASA decided to fly a payload on the first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, which Blue Origin was developing on its own; NASA rechristened that mission “Moon Base 1” at the event. Now the company has four NASA missions for the lander, counting the two LTV missions and a separate award last September for NASA’s VIPER rover, scheduled to launch in 2027. The contracts give Blue Origin critical experience in landing on the moon that would transfer to the larger Mark 2 lander it is developing for crewed missions, potentially giving the company an edge over SpaceX’s Starship. At the briefing, NASA did not discuss plans for human landings. But the agency said just after the lunar base event that it will announce the crew for Artemis 3 — the 2027 mission intended to test both Blue Moon Mark 2 and Starship in low Earth orbit — on June 9. NASA at least had an initial plan for its moon base — until it blew up barely 48 hours later. Explosive setback By selecting Blue Moon, NASA was also betting on Blue Origin’s New Glenn. The rocket has flown only three times and, on its latest mission in April, an upper stage malfunction stranded its payload, an AST SpaceMobile satellite, into a low orbit. However, the company worked quickly to resolve the problem, and the FAA announced May 22 it would al…