Delivery service to the moon: Blue Origin offers to build a lander to deliver supplies to a manned base on the moon

A few days after SpaceX announced that it intends to send space tourists to fly around the moon, the competing company Blue Origin, which is owned by the billionaire and founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos, announced that it is also interested in the moon. According to the company's proposal, it will develop a lander for NASA to transfer equipment and cargo to the lunar surface, to help establish a manned base on it.

Is the race to return to the moon heating up? In the last month, since the inauguration of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, the moon has been grabbing more and more headlines. NASA announced that it is considering preempting its first manned flight around the moon, SpaceX announced that Next year, space tourists will be launched on a similar flight, and now Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, is revealing its own plan to help build a manned base on the moon.

the plan was revealed for the first time in a report of the Washington Post (which is also owned by Bezos), in which it was stated that the company's proposal was written on a 7-page white paper, which the Blue Origin company forwarded to members of the Trump administration and senior officials at NASA, back during the presidential transition in January 4th.

According to Blue Origin's proposal, it will cooperate with NASA and build a lander for it to transfer cargo to the lunar surface, which will be called "Blue Moon". The lander will not be manned, but will allow the transfer of cargo and equipment required for the construction and maintenance of a manned base on the moon. The company also proposes to use the lander to transport robotic research vehicles to the moon and vehicles that will return samples from it to Earth. According to the document, the first mission of the lander could be carried out already in the middle of 2020.

The manned base on the moon that Blue Origin is proposing is very similar to many previous proposals made in the past - it will be located at the south pole of the moon, where there is almost constant water and sunlight, which will support a manned base: the water can be used not only for drinking, but also for fuel production; The almost constant exposure to sunlight at the poles will allow continuous electricity production, and will also prevent the extreme temperature differences between day and night on the moon.

Blue Origin offers in the document the Shackleton Crater at the south pole of the moon as the future manned base site. While the rim of the crater, which is 21 km in diameter, is almost always exposed to sunlight, the inside of the crater is very cold and completely dark - and there is plenty of ice.

The lander, according to the proposal, could be launched on a wide variety of launchers: from the relatively "small" Atlas 5 launcher to the heavy SLS launcher that NASA is currently developing. It can also be launched on the heavy and multipurpose "New Glen" Blue Origin launcher Developer these days, and its first test flight is scheduled to take place by the end of this decade. The lander will be able to carry up to 4.5 tons of cargo to the lunar surface.

Blue Origin emphasized that the program could only be done with the help of NASA. The document calls on the space agency to provide incentives to the private sector to develop technology to transfer cargo to the lunar surface, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the agency's current program, in which private companies (SpaceX and Orbital A.T.K.) deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

At the Aviation Week magazine conference held yesterday, Bezos expressed his hope for cooperation with the American space agency. "We hope to cooperate with NASA in a program called Blue Moon, in which we will provide a cargo delivery service to the lunar surface, with the goal that over time a permanent manned colony will be built on the moon," Bezos said. "It's time for America to go back to the moon, and this time to stay. We can do it. This is a complicated goal, but a worthy one." as per Aviation Week's report, Bezos pitched the idea to NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and other senior officials at the agency, and later said the proposal was "well received" by them.

Blue Origin's proposal comes at a time when the moon appears to be a more favored destination than Mars for the United States. Although the Trump administration has not yet announced its policy in the field of space, and especially regarding its intentions for the future of the United States' manned space program, many speculate that it intends to return to focusing on the moon. In 2010, the Obama administration canceled the "Constellation Program", which was initiated by President Bush with the aim of returning the United States to the moon by the end of the current decade. Instead, Obama proposed preparing for a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 30s, but a return to the moon now appears to be a more practical and immediate goal that would provide a political victory for the Trump administration, and could possibly be accomplished as early as his current term (in the form of an orbit around the moon rather than a landing on it). .

Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, but until a few years ago it operated in almost total secrecy. In November 2015 she hit the headlines when managed for the first time in history to re-land a sub-orbital launcher. The vehicle, called "New Shepard" after the first American astronaut Alan Shepard, is being developed by the company to launch space tourists to an altitude of about 100 km (the official threshold of space), but not to orbit around the Earth. The company has since made several other successful attempts with the suborbital vehicle, and this year it intends to launch humans on it for the first time. Blue Origin is also developing, as mentioned, an orbital space launcher called "New Glen” (named after John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth).