Cosmic Log
It’s not you, it’s me: That’s basically what Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is saying about his decision to end participation in a reality-TV matchmaking show that would have traced the selection of a woman contestant to accompany him on a trip around the moon.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has posted more than 50 job openings for its Blue Moon lunar lander program, which is currently under consideration for NASA funding.
Alabama-based Dynetics says it’s leading a team of companies proposing a crew-carrying lunar lander for NASA, in competition with other companies including Blue Origin and Boeing.
What do you get when you cross “The Bachelor” with “Survivor,” and then throw in a round-the-moon trip? You might get the reality-TV project that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has signed on for.
REDMOND, Wash. — Representatives of Aerojet Rocketdyne and Lockheed Martin put their signatures on a contract for up to $170 million worth of rocket hardware that’ll be installed on Orion spacecraft heading to the moon — with dozens of employees who’ll actually build that hardware watching the proceedings.
“These are the things you’re going to be talking to your grandchildren about,” Cheryl Rehm, Aerojet Rocketdyne’s senior director of Redmond programs, told company employees here at today’s signing ceremony.
The ceremony highlighted Redmond’s role in NASA’s Artemis moon landings.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is among five companies that have just been cleared to deliver payloads to the moon for NASA. So is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is offering its Starship super-rocket for lunar trips.
Sierra Nevada Corp., Ceres Robotics and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems round out today’s list, joining nine other commercial teams that were put into NASA’s “catalog” for lunar delivery services a year ago. NASA has already picked two of those teams, headed by Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, to put science experiments on the moon in 2021.
The next delivery orders in what NASA calls the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS, are likely to call for payloads to be launched by 2022, said Steve Clarke, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate. One payload that’s certain to be on the list is NASA’s VIPER rover, which is destined to look for signs of water near the moon’s south pole in late 2022.
KENT, Wash. — The City of Kent’s newest lunar rover wouldn’t stand up to the radiation-blasted conditions on the surface of the moon, but it’s designed to endure a testing ground that’s nearly as harsh: a park playground.
A kid-friendly reproduction of the moon buggies that transported astronauts around the lunar surface during the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions of 1971-1972 had its unveiling on Nov. 14 here at the Accesso Showare Center, which more typically plays host to the Seattle Thunderbirds’ hockey games.
Boeing historian and archivist Mike Lombardi says the rover is a slapshot score.
“Two thumbs up,” he told GeekWire. “It’s a wonderful replica.”
That’s high praise, considering that Boeing built and tested the real-life lunar rovers for NASA in Kent. Three of the two-seated contraptions are still sitting on the lunar surface, and won landmark status from King County in July by virtue of their Kent connection. State historical status is due to be sought for the rovers next March.
Which will go into commercial service first: Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lunar lander, or the Lego toy versions?
The answer will depend not only on how much progress Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ space venture makes on the real things, but on how many people support the Lego Ideas project as well.
The 2,670-piece set would include a 1:110 scale version of the two-stage New Glenn and the human-capable variant of the Blue Moon lander, plus extras including a launch tower, rovers and a satellite. The rocket would be about 40 inches high.
The whole assemblage is designed by Valerie Roche and Matthew Nolan, the team behind the 1,969-piece Saturn V Lego rocket (which is also built to 1:110 scale), plus proposed SpaceX Falcon/Dragon and SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy rocket sets.
For the first time in more than 40 years, NASA has opened up a pristine sample of moon dirt and rocks that was collected during the Apollo missions.
Scientists hope that a close analysis of the material from a 2-foot-long, nearly 2-inch-wide core sample will help astronauts get ready for a new series of Artemis moon missions in the 2020s.
When Apollo’s moonwalkers collected samples of lunar soil and rock, also known as regolith, some of those samples were tucked away at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with the expectation that analytical tools would improve over the course of the decades that followed. The idea was to keep the samples fresh until the proper time.
NASA says that proper time is now.
The first of the stored lunar samples, known as 73002, was pushed out of its container at Johnson Space Center’s Lunar Curation Laboratory on Nov. 5.
Boeing says it has submitted its proposal for a lunar lander capable of putting astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024, joining a competition that includes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and most likely SpaceX as well.
Today marked the deadline for submissions. NASA says it’s aiming to select at least two proposed landing systems by January for further development. Two separate teams could be selected to build landers for moon missions in 2024 and 2025.
NASA envisions a system that includes a transfer vehicle to ferry a lander from a lunar-orbiting Gateway outpost to an orbit that’s closer to the moon, a descent element that would put astronauts onto the surface, and an ascent element that would carry them back to the Gateway.
But Boeing said its lander wouldn’t require the extra ride on a transfer vehicle. Instead, the linked-up descent and ascent elements could be sent directly to low lunar orbit, using a beefed-up version of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket.