Blue Origin’s Endurance moon lander may live up to its name: the spacecraft has completed a battery of tests inside a NASA vacuum simulation chamber, the space agency revealed on Monday. The checks are crucial if Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s private space company, is to test launch the lander later this year, as it hopes to do.
Endurance, also known as the Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1), is a single-use, uncrewed cargo lander that will operate as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, in which the space agency works with private companies to develop new cargo delivery systems for use in its planned Artemis moon missions. MK1 is designed to deliver up to three metric tons of supplies and equipment to the lunar surface—a critical capability as NASA looks to set up a permanently staffed moon base.
During the course of the testing at the agency’s Johnson Space Center, Endurance was subjected to conditions similar to those in space, including extreme temperatures and the stresses of a vacuum. Data from these tests will now be analyzed and used to improve MK1’s design, as well as that of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK 2) spacecraft—a larger, crewed landing system that Bezos’s company hopes will be used to ferry astronauts from a craft in lunar orbit to the moon’s surface and back. MK 2 will potentially take part in 2027’s Artemis III mission, which will test the ability of NASA’s crewed Orion spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with a commercial lunar lander. Both MK2 and a moon lander variant of SpaceX’s Starship are candidates for the mission.
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It remains to be seen which spacecraft will ultimately be used in the agency’s Artemis IV mission to deliver astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time in more than half a century. SpaceX’s Starship is also still in development; the spacecraft has exploded several times during test flights, although its last demonstration was a success. Another demo flight is on the docket for as soon as later this month.
Endurance now has to prove it can survive the pressure of launch and flight in space. That’s due to happen later this year on Blue Origin’s Pathfinder Mission 1, in which the lunar lander will be launched onboard one of the company’s New Glenn rockets. In the mission, the lander’s engine, cryogenic power fluid and propulsion systems, avionics and other systems will be put through their paces.
NASA also hopes to use the lander for its upcoming CT-3 Science mission, which will carry two science payloads to the moon’s south pole. Those instruments will be used to capture photographs of a lunar descent to help inform future missions to the surface. And they will be employed to study what sorts of material gets ejected from the surface as the lander falls.