Blue Origin unveils Blue Moon Mk1 lander mock up

Blue Origin Friday unveiled its Mk1 version of its Blue Moon lander that holds a contract with NASA for crewed Artemis missions. Mk1 is capable of delivering three-metric tons of cargo to anywhere on the lunar surface. However, it is only cable of landing cargo and science payloads, and is not reusable.

Blue Origin already showing off possible flight hardware

In a rather shocking announcement on social media, Blue Origin showed off its Mk1 version of its Blue Moon lander. This one time use, cargo only version of the Blue Moon lander will test the key technologies needed for when Blue Origin eventually uses its lander to land Artemis crews on the surface of the Moon in the second half of the decade.

Blue Origin was awarded the second contract from NASA to provide a lander for Artemis crews starting with Artemis 5 earlier this year. This was Blue Origin’s second attempt at winning the contract. The company lost to SpaceX’s Starship rocket after a rather nasty appeals process back in 2021.

It was reported that Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos was still funding the development of Blue Moon post the 2021 contract loss. Some speculation was that it was on life support while others said that Blue Moon is a very real program Blue Origin wants to build. It looks like the latter was correct as the company looks to already have flight hardware ready, or at least a very high fidelity test lander.

The white and gold lander stands almost three stories tall and will ride in New Glenn’s seven meter fairing. Blue Origin states that with its own rocket, Blue Moon can land anywhere on the Moon allowing research opportunities not seen before on the commercial market.

We unveiled our nearly 3-story Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander demonstrator. MK1's early missions will pave the way and prove technologies for our MK2 lander for @NASA's Human Landing System. #ArtemisV pic.twitter.com/5I8jmq7Rvy

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 27, 2023

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Blue Moon testing long before first Artemis flight

Blue Origin states that Mk1 is a testing platform, however, it will still serve as a commercial service for customers to purchase space on. Mk1-SN001 will fly without any customers on board. It’s mission will be to test all the critical systems like the BE-7 engine, communications, and landing on the Moon.

Mk1-SN002, assuming everything goes well with the first lander, will be open for customers to house payloads on for travels to the Moon. When Blue Origin’s Artemis HLS contract was announced, the company said test flights could begin as soon as 2024.

The biggest hold up will be the company’s New Glenn rocket. Currently still under development at the company’s facilities at Kennedy Space Center, we don’t know much about how it’s going. However, its a pretty poorly kept secret that there’s a lot of activity happening inside those buildings and we might just be surprised.

Blue Moon’s competitor, Starship, has been stuck most of this year awaiting approval from government agencies to fly again. We know that some development is underway for Starship’s HLS variant, but no full scale versions have been seen at Starbase just yet.

So with our surprise at the announcement of an early Blue Moon variant, maybe there’s room for another surprise just around the corner of a flight ready New Glenn?

Or maybe I’m just getting my hopes up.