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An artist’s conception shows the Blue Moon MK1 lander on the moon. (Blue Origin Illustration)
NASA says it has penciled in Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander to deliver a scientific payload to the moon’s south polar region as soon as this summer.
The uncrewed lander would rank as the largest spacecraft sent to the moon’s surface, and would set the stage for a larger crewed lander that would be used for moon missions in the 2030s. By that time, if all proceeds according to plan, SpaceX’s Starship would take over the top spot as the world’s most massive moon ship.
Blue Origin was created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2000 and is headquartered in Kent, Wash. For years, Bezos has voiced a strong interest in lunar exploration. “It’s time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay,” he declared in 2017.
NASA’s payload for Blue Origin’s first mission to the moon is a suite of cameras that’s designed to record how the blast from Blue Moon’s engines disturbs the dirt and rocks at the lunar landing site. The data from that experiment — known as Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies, or SCALPSS — would be factored into the preparations for crewed landings.
Similar payloads flew on Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander, which conducted a partially successful mission on the moon last year; and on Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost M1 lander, which landed on the moon earlier this month. The data from the Blue Moon mission would give NASA a better sense of what to expect when a heavier spacecraft touches down.
Both Blue Origin and NASA have said they expect the first Blue Moon mission to take place this year, but NASA appeared to narrow down the time frame in a chart that was shown during a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. The chart suggested that Blue Origin would take on the next mission for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, with launch set for August.
“That’s going to be on their Mark 1 Serial No. 1 lander,” Brad Bailey, NASA’s assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration, told the audience as he showed the chart. (Later missions were listed for Astrobotic in late 2025, and Intuitive Machines, Firefly and Draper in 2026.)
An August launch isn’t necessarily set in stone. Blue Moon is scheduled to launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which had its first liftoff in January and is still in its development and testing phase. After the first New Glenn launch, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the second launch was planned for late spring. “We sort of treat the first three flights as development flights,” Limp said at the time.
The challenges associated with getting New Glenn and Blue Moon ready for a landmark moon mission could conceivably push the launch later in the year — and SCALPSS is likely to be only one of several payloads scheduled for delivery. We’ve reached out to Blue Origin and NASA for more information, and will update this report with anything we can pass along.
