Billionaire Bezos unveils moon lander mockup, embraces Trump's lunar timetable

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos unveiled on Thursday a mockup of a lunar lander being built by his Blue Origin rocket company and touted his moon goals in a strategy aimed at capitalizing on the Trump administration’s renewed push to establish a lunar outpost in just five years.

  

The world’s richest man and Amazon.com Inc’s chief executive waved an arm and a black drape behind him dropped to reveal the two-story-tall mockup of the unmanned lander dubbed Blue Moon during an hour-long presentation at Washington’s convention center, just several blocks from the White House.

The lander will be able to deliver payloads to the lunar surface, deploy up to four smaller rovers and shoot out satellites to orbit the moon, Bezos told the audience, which included NASA officials and potential Blue Moon customers.

His media event followed Vice President Mike Pence’s March 26 announcement that NASA plans to build a space platform in lunar orbit and put American astronauts on the moon’s south pole by 2024 “by any means necessary,” four years earlier than previously planned.

“I love this,” Bezos said of Pence’s timeline. “We can help meet that timeline but only because we started three years ago. It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.”

While Bezos went out of his way to praise Pence’s timeline, the billionaire has been the target of repeated criticism from President Donald Trump, who has referred to him as Jeff “Bozo.” Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which Trump has frequently targeted in his broadsides against the news media.

In their lunar ambitions, however, Trump and Bezos are very much in harmony. Trump in 2017 made a return to the moon a high priority for the U.S. space program, saying a mission to put astronauts back on the lunar surface would establish a foundation for an eventual journey to put humans on Mars. If re-elected next year, 2024 would be Trump’s final full year in office.

At his presentation, Bezos unveiled a model of one of the proposed rovers, roughly the size of a golf cart, and presented a new rocket engine called BE-7, which can blast 10,000 pounds (4,535 kg) of thrust.

BLUE ORIGIN’S AMBITIONS

Privately held Blue Origin, based in Kent, Washington, is developing its New Shepard rocket for short space tourism trips and a heavy-lift launch rocket called New Glenn for satellite launch contracts. A Blue Origin executive told Reuters last month New Glenn rocket would be ready by 2021. Bezos on Thursday said launching humans on suborbital flights would take place later this year on New Shepard.

Blue Origin has previously discussed a human outpost on the moon.

During his presentation, which sounded at times more like a professorial lecture than a business plan, Bezos did not address a specific launch schedule for the lander or a specific mission for it.

NASA has set its sights on the moon’s south pole, a region believed to hold enough recoverable ice water for use in synthesizing additional rocket fuel as well as for drinking water to sustain astronauts.

Bezos, intent on moving Blue Origin closer to commercialization, underscored his broader vision of enabling a future in which millions of people live and work in space. He mentioned two important issues: reducing launch costs and using resources already in space.

“One of the most important things we know about the moon today is that there’s water there,” Bezos said. “It’s in the form of ice. It’s in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon.”

His announcement came about two months before the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and he began his presentation with video of that event.

Bezos did not address his company’s Twitter post last month teasing the event with a picture of the ship used by explorer Ernest Shackleton on a 1914 expedition to Antarctica. Industry sources said the image was a likely reference to an impact crater on the lunar south pole sharing the man’s name, raising speculation that Blue Origin’s lander was targeting that spot.

His vision is shared by competing billionaire-backed private space ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and aerospace incumbents like United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin.

Source: www.reuters.com

NASA auditors criticize spacesuit development

Despite spending nearly $200 million on spacesuit development over the last eight years, NASA runs the risk of not having a next-generation spacesuit ready for testing on the International Space Station before the station is retired, the agency’s auditors warned.

In an April 26 report, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) also warned that NASA’s declining current inventory of spacesuits, developed in the 1970s, pose a risk to continued operations of the ISS, particularly if its life is extended to the late 2020s.

Those current spacesuits, formally known as Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), are used for spacewalks outside the ISS. A key element of the suit is its Primary Life Support System (PLSS), the backpack-like structure that houses equipment to regulate levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide within the suit and control its temperature.

NASA built 18 PLSS units, but only 11 remain available for use today. Of those 11, four are considered flight-ready today and are on the ISS, with the other seven in various stages of disassembly or testing on the ground.

The OIG report warned that further losses of PLSS units, either from launch failures or because of irreparable damage, could jeopardize NASA’s ability to perform spacewalks outside the station, which in turn could affect station maintenance. The agency said that the current supply of spacesuits should be sufficient to support station operations, but auditors were not convinced.

“NASA will be challenged to continue to support the EVA needs of the ISS with the current fleet of EMUs through 2024 — a challenge that will escalate significantly if Station operations are extended to 2028,” the report concluded.

NASA has ruled out building additional PLSS units, citing a cost as high as $250 million per unit given their old technology. Instead, NASA has worked on new spacesuit designs, including those that could support future missions beyond Earth orbit. Those efforts, though, have suffered a series of problems, according to the OIG report.

Auditors were particularly critical of the Constellation Space Suit System program, which started with a 2009 contract to Oceaneering International to develop a spacesuit as part of the Constellation exploration program. NASA kept that contract active until January 2016 despite the cancellation of the overall Constellation program in 2010, spending a total of $135.6 million on it, including $80.8 million after NASA cancelled Constellation.

The report criticized NASA for extending the program, with a new focus on developing spacesuit technologies, in part because it duplicated work on another NASA effort, the Advanced Space Suit Project. Technologies being developed by that project were often more advanced than those being developed simultaneously by the Constellation suit program, auditors found, even though NASA spent nearly three times as much on the Constellation contract.

The Advanced Space Suit Project, though, has had issues of its own, including a lack of defined destinations for NASA exploration missions that affect spacesuit design as well as “competing funding priorities” that meant that the project was funded for only half of the 2016 fiscal year.

That project is now working on a spacesuit design known as an Exploration EMU, or xEMU, that will start with a prototype called xEMU Lite to be tested on the ISS. Current schedules call for that suit to be delivered to the station in 2023 for testing. “This schedule leaves only one year for testing before the Station’s planned 2024 retirement,” the report stated, but added that “extending ISS operations beyond 2024 would alleviate this schedule pressure.”

A third program, the Orion Crew Survival Suit, is a pressure suit designed for use in the Orion spacecraft and is based on the Advanced Crew Escape System suits used during the shuttle program. That program, too, is facing schedule pressures, with a delivery of the suits currently planned just five months before the current launch date for the first crewed Orion mission in August 2021. That date, though, may be delayed, based on a recent separate OIG review of NASA’s exploration programs.

NASA has spent nearly $200 million on those three next-generation spacesuit programs. “Despite this investment, the Agency remains years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit capable of replacing the EMU or suitable for EVA use on future exploration missions,” the report concluded.

Auditors made several recommendations to NASA, including creating a formal plan for developing a next-generation spacesuit, performing a trade study comparing maintaining the current EMU spacesuits versus developing a new one, and apply lessons learned from existing spacesuit efforts to new designs. NASA accepted all three recommendations, and plans to have a spacesuit development plan completed by the end of September.

Source: http://spacenews.com