Why Blue Origin's Lunar Lander Is A Radical Rethink

foreign Scott Manley here as you may have heard by now blue origin is building a lunar lander and NASA is now funding it to the tune of about three and a half billion dollars a lot has changed since their bid of a couple years ago to get the human Landing system contract if you remember the main competitors were blue origin dynetics with their uh cool little low slung alpaca Lander and of course SpaceX with their absolutely monstrously huge Starship lunar lander all of these competed and SpaceX won partly because it was really big but also because it was by far the cheapest and so they had a big announcement on Friday and this is all the information we really have to work on this image like okay we have a few other things we know they're just running on hydrogen and oxygen that's for its main propulsion for its reaction control thrusters and for its fuel cells and so given the lack of public information I decided I would build something similar in Kerbal Space Program too the sequel to curl Space Program of course is something I should probably be playing more but I have that whole real life thing getting in the way as much as I like it but yeah um this is what I have so it is kind of interesting you'll notice that the fuel tanks are sitting on top of the habitation module underneath uh the habitation module has like a docking adapter on the side that's how it will adopt to the Gateway or to the Orion capsule and I should say that this docking adapter is being built by Boeing so when I said blue origin it's really the blue origin lead national team and it is a collaboration between blue origin Boeing Lockheed Draper Labs astrobotics I I think there's a few other names involved there some of whom may primarily be involved on testing Hardware side whereas you've got someone like a Lockheed who want to build one of the refueling vehicles and refueling is very much key to this design there are no disposable Parts unless they choose to dispose off them there is a disposable option but yeah this vehicle is going to be launched into low earth orbit on New Glen it is sized for new Glenn that will carry it will then fly out to the Moon presumably using its own thrusters and then it will be refueled by a completely separate spacecraft that will you know load it up with hydrogen and oxygen propellant and this is one of the key technology technologies that will have to be solved because performing cryogenic propellant transfer is still something that hasn't really been done properly and then we have to do it with liquid hydrogen which is even colder it has a temperature of 20 Kelvin and of course is so desperate to escape through those tiny little holes in your welding or tanks or whatever now coming back to that comment about launching on New Glen the new Glen has a seven meter wide fairing we're told that the vehicle is 16 meters tall standing on the lunar surface so this is close to what the sizes would be roughly based upon uh you know a paper that looked at the size of the new Glen fairing the other thing we're told during the event is that the vehicle's dry Mass was about 16 tons and when it was fueled it would be north of 45 tons and I actually think that what the guy was referring to was the mass that they were launching on the initial new Glen be because guess what the payload to low earth orbit as quoted by Blue origin is 45 tons I think when they actually load up with propellant in lunar orbit for the landing it will have whatever propellant it needs and it could have a wet mass of higher than 45 tons I have a few reasons why I suspect this is the case but that involves math and I will get to that later let's talk about the rest of the hardware so the main propulsion is going to be provided by be7 engines so this is blue Origins engines they are hydrogen expander cycle engines presumably similar to the rl-10 and if we take a guess the performance is probably around the same you're a 460 to 470 seconds of impulse which has exhaust velocities of about 4.5 to 4.6 kilometers per second we don't actually know how many engines there are we just know that they said engines presumably to support the idea of role of you know redundancy and reliability I put three engines on this and I put them around the outside because I think that that makes for a better layout rather than having like a big Post in the middle of the room where uh you know you can't use that space from this angle you can see there are antenna and communication gear on top of it I think there might be some sort of docking adapt on the top for refueling but it's not clear where the refueling would actually happen and it looks like there's going to be four radiators that hang off the sides and this is going to be a critical part to making a hydrogen a storable propellant that can be used liquid hydrogen needs temperatures of 20 Kelvin to remain in that state and so they're going to need some sort of active refrigeration system to reject excess heat that's absorbed and cool the liquid back down to keep it at the temperature so it doesn't vaporize they've talked about having some sort of multi-stage cryo coolers on board and radiators to not only shell a shield the tank from solar radiation but also that can be deployed in a manner to maximize the radiation uh you know their heat rejection and while we couldn't see any solar panels they did say during the press conference that they were on the far side of the vehicle because if you look at the image the sun is you know behind as in front of the camera therefore the solar panels aren't going to be on this site I think there's a reason for that because we see the windows but the pilots or whatever the crew will be sitting at looking as they are descending and if you're landing at the poles then the Sun is going to be low on the horizon so you want to make sure that you do not have the sun shining straight in at your pilot therefore this spacecraft is presumably going to orient itself so the crew cabin is facing away from the Sun therefore the solar panels will be on the other side so that they can take advantage of The Sun Also on the sun side that is where the airlock will be the they are having an airlock so that they can access this lunar surface without having to depressurize the entire spacecraft presumably that means that they have the option for some astronauts to remain in the vehicle while other ones go out on the surface and yeah if you haven't guessed by now the fact that they put the crew cabin at the bottom of the vehicle ensures that they have easy access to the surface of the Moon and that was a criticism of previous designs of lunar Landers that to make them big enough to be reusable the they had to be very high up off the surface now dynetics had previously embraced that with their alpaca Lander and the national team didn't make any accommodation this time around the redesign has definitely made a lunar surface access a whole lot easier and yet the other big feature on the side of the crew cabin is the docking adapter that's going to be important because the spacecraft has to dock with the lunar Gateway or potentially Orion the fact that this has to dock to the lunar Gateway as well is another argument for why there might be another place to refuel this spacecraft so that it could actually refuel while docked at the lunar Gateway if it has to dock to the Gateway it's going to need a full set of reaction control thrusters to enable not just rotation but translation and blue origin have actually shown images on their Twitter uh sharing their reaction control thrusters which will actually use hydrogen and oxygen and this is something off a first in space flight normally you would use storable hypergolics or mono propellants that can be turned on and off very quickly but if you're trying to reduce this to a single fuel system then uh you've got to use hydrogen and oxygen for everything the other thing we're going to use hydrogen and oxygen for is the fuel cells which will provide Power if they are operating in lunar night without solar cells so anyway let's come back to the wet and dry Mass issue that I sort of talked about as I said that it was going to have a wet mass of north of 45 tons and a dry mass of 16 tons if you plug those numbers into the rocket equation and you assume that the be7 operates at rough the same performance as the rl10 which is 455 seconds of impulse or an exhaust velocity for about 4. you know five six kilometers per second then with that wet dry Mass ratio you get a total Delta V about 4.7 kilometers per second which is a little on the low side since most of NASA's studies talk about our budget about 2.5 kilometers per second both directions so that would be a bit short on top of this they specifically talked about it being able to land 20 tons of cargo on the moon and 30 tons if they're not gonna planning to reuse a vehicle and finally if you take the image and you measure things and you assume the vehicle is 16 meters tall on the moon then the hydrogen tank is way too big for the number that they said so I think what we've got here is the 45 ton number was just what is going to launch on new Glenn and that they have extra room in those tanks so that they can fill it up with maybe 45 tons of propellant onto top of the 16 ton vehicle I'm sure the blue origin will at some point step forward and tell us a little bit more about the ladder and perhaps correct the values and tell me whether I'm right or wrong but honestly it doesn't make that much of a difference as far as we're concerned what is more interesting is the fact that this is a radical turnaround from what the national team originally offered back when NASA was doing the studies a few years ago they were looking at these you know multi-stage Vehicles which would be launched on multiple Rockets they would be assembled in orbit they would refuel they would have ferries that would carry things from between orbits and SpaceX came along and won the human Landing system competition with a monolithic vehicle which was refueled in nrho and let's be clear this isn't a SpaceX uh invention as Lockheed Martin actually had a monolithic Lander that they promoted back in like 2018 it was also fueled with hydrogen and I also did a simulation of that in Kerbal Space Program and it too required an elevator to reach the surface of the Moon but it was actually a whole lot shorter than Starship it is worth noting that both options for landing on the moon right now require refueling in space using cryogenic storage long-term cryogenic storage which hasn't been you know proven and it also uses launch Vehicles which are larger than the ones available neither of which have made it to orbit but honestly the launch vehicle isn't as big a deal as you might imagine when you look at the Apollo program the First Flight of the Saturn V was something like 18 months before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon what it's more likely to be a problem of course is the fact that a lot of this is getting paid for by Congress and there's always politics around funding things like this but even if political priorities change there are several important technologies that this project is going to be developing that can be applied elsewhere again the ability to store liquid hydrogen in space for a long period of time is hugely important not just for landing on the moon with the Artemis program but for a whole lot of other prospects remember there's renewed interest in developing nuclear thermal engines and they work best on hydrogen as they're propellant and for the kind of long duration interplanetary missions where a nuclear thermal engine makes sense you need to store your liquid hydrogen for a long time so this is like a key technology that will also contribute to other Technologies it's the kind of thing that Jeff Bezos has made it clear that blue origin is interested in doing I'm Scott Manley fly 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Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 387,468

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Id: GpoR87UDnPA

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023