HOUSTON — NASA has provided more details about the revised approaches that Blue Origin and SpaceX are taking to accelerate work on Artemis lunar landers.
At a June 9 event at the Johnson Space Center, NASA announced the crew of the Artemis 3 mission, a test flight in low Earth orbit in which an Orion spacecraft will dock with prototypes of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX’s Starship lunar landers.
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 “acceleration approaches” for their Human Landing System, or HLS, landers, but neither NASA nor the companies had released many details about those concepts.
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.
“We have an updated plan with NASA that includes docking Starship with Orion in Earth orbit instead of NRHO,” or near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon, said Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, during the event. “Then we use Starship to do the translunar injection with Orion attached.”
