EDITOR’S NOTE: Check back after the 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) announcement for an updated story.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, plans to update his vision for spaceflight and lunar exploration Thursday in Washington, as NASA seeks commercial partners for the Trump administration’s goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2024.
Bezos is scheduled to speak at an invitation-only event in Washington at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) Thursday. The content of Bezos’s remarks have not been released, but Blue Origin, the billionaire businessman’s space venture, released a picture on Twitter on April 26 that seemingly hinted that the announcement is related to the moon.
The image tweeted by Blue Origin showed the Endurance, the ship used by Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, surrounded by polar pack ice during the attempted Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The Endurance became stranded in ice and sunk in 1915 before reaching Antarctica.
Vice President Mike Pence announced in March that the Trump administration is directing NASA to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024, and to target a landing at the moon’s South Pole, home to craters with bottoms that never see sunlight.
The permanently-shadowed crater floors are cold traps that measurements from lunar orbit indicate harbor water ice, which could be tapped by future landers or moon bases to generate rocket fuel, electricity and oxygen. At the lunar South Pole, there are also places that see nearly constant sunlight, such as crater rims, providing a site that solar-powered probes could land and operate.
One crater at the lunar South Pole was named for Shackleton, leading many observers to conclude Thursday’s announcement involves Blue Origin’s ambitions for a moon landing.
Shackleton Crater measures about 13 miles (21 kilometers) wide and 2.6 miles (4.2 kilometers) deep.
Blue Origin has worked on a robotic lunar lander, called Blue Moon, for several years to carry supplies, experiments and other cargo to the moon’s surface. The company’s other main projects are the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets.
The New Shepard, which has flown 11 times from Blue Origin’s test site in West Texas, is a a reusable suborbital rocket designed to carry space tourists to edge of space. The New Shepard has not yet flown with human passengers.
The orbital-class New Glenn rocket is set for its inaugural launch in 2021 from Cape Canaveral. The New Glenn’s basic two-stage variant will be able to lift up to 45 metric tons — nearly 100,000 pounds — to low Earth orbit, and its first stage will return to land on a ship at sea, using a landing profile similar to the one used by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters.
After Pence’s speech in March directing NASA to return humans to the moon by 2024, the space agency has kicked off procurement steps to begin seeking concepts for a human-rated lunar lander from industry.
Under the terms of NASA’s most recent lunar lander procurement notice, which the agency released April 26, NASA officials are seeking an integrated moon landing vehicle from commercial industry. NASA originally sought different pieces of a lunar lander, which will include a transfer vehicle, descent stage and an ascent stage, from industry, with the government responsible for integrating the segments into a complete vehicle.
But NASA believes seeking a complete landing craft from industry will be faster, according to Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of the agency’s human exploration and operations directorate.
NASA’s roadmap for a lunar landing by 2024 involves building a mini-space station in lunar orbit called the Gateway. A lunar lander, provided by a commercial company, would launch to the Gateway on a commercial rocket, where it would wait for the arrival of a team of NASA astronauts aboard an Orion crew capsule launched aboard NASA’s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket.
NASA expects to select a contractor for the first piece of the Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, as soon as June or July for launch in 2022, with the selection of a manufacturer for a habitat module late this year for a launch in 2023, providing a safe haven for astronauts to live on short stays before and after their landing on the moon.
Meanwhile, NASA continues building the Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule for an unpiloted test flight in lunar orbit in late 2020 or early 2021, a mission that has been delayed by several years by technical woes. The test flight, designated Exploration Mission-1, would be the first launch of the Space Launch System and the first Orion mission beyond Earth orbit.
Exploration Mission-2 would follow in 2022 to carry astronauts around the moon and back to Earth, setting the stage for a lunar landing attempt in 2024, once the initial version of the Gateway is in place in lunar orbit, according to a roadmap outlined by Gerstenmaier on April 30 at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Space Studies Board.
Gerstenmaier said Wednesday at a congressional hearing that NASA and the White House expect to release a revised budget proposal to Congress within one or two weeks, with information about the expected cost of the accelerated lunar landing initiative, which would bring forward the schedule for a human landing on the moon from 2028 to 2024.
Other companies are working on human-rated lunar landers, including Lockheed Martin, which unveiled its latest moon landing vehicle concept last month at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The Lockheed Martin lander would reuse computer, life support and propulsion technology from the Orion spacecraft, which Lockheed Martin also builds, in order to get it ready for a moon mission by 2024.
NASA signed agreements in November with nine companies to provide robotic landing services to the moon for experiments and cargo. At the time, industry and NASA officials said the robotic landers could provide technology basis for larger landing craft in the future capable of ferrying humans to and from the lunar surface.
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