HOUSTON - NASA has finally spilled the beans on how Blue Origin and SpaceX plan to speed up their lunar lander work, and it involves some creative rethinking of the whole moon-travel business.

At a June 9 event at the Johnson Space Center, NASA unveiled the crew for Artemis 3 - a test flight where an Orion spacecraft will play cosmic bumper cars with prototypes of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX’s Starship in low Earth orbit. The goal? Get one of these landers ready for Artemis 4, the first crewed lunar landing attempt scheduled for 2028.

SpaceX’s big idea is to use Starship as both a lunar lander and a translunar injection (TLI) stage. “We have an updated plan with NASA that includes docking Starship with Orion in Earth orbit instead of NRHO,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX, referring to the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. “Then we use Starship to do the translunar injection with Orion attached.” The combined stack will head to low lunar orbit, where Starship will break free for its landing.

“This approach improves crew safety by, first, conducting the critical crew docking event in Earth orbit, just like we’re going to practice on Artemis 3,” Jensen said. “And the crew can abort off the lunar surface almost any time versus waiting up to days from NRHO.” It also cuts down on propellant needs, meaning fewer tanker launches - though she didn’t say exactly how many fewer.

Steve Creech, NASA HLS program manager, was thrilled: “The big thing in my mind is it eliminated the loiter requirements we had on them in order to rendezvous out in a lunar orbit.” Less waiting means fewer special systems for the HLS version of Starship, bringing it closer to the fleet design.

The Artemis 3 Starship will be a Starship V3 “taken off the line” with just a docking adapter tacked on, Jensen noted. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman pointed to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon experience, but emphasized that “other controllability tests” of the Starship-Orion stack are key - especially handling the negative-X axis acceleration during TLI burns.

For Blue Origin, the big change is ditching its “transporter” spacecraft - a propellant shuttle that would have stored liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in low Earth orbit. Instead, they’re using “Mark 1-derived transfer stages,” a reference to the uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. Creech said this “eliminated really some of the biggest technology development risks that they had” and could allow for an earlier first crewed landing.

John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said at the event that manufacturing is humming along on the Artemis 3 Mark 2 lunar crew module and other subsystems. “Our factories are running around-the-clock shifts in a responsible manner.” He added, “We expect to complete the vehicle for Artemis 3 and be ready for launch in 2027.” All this while investigating the New Glenn explosion during a May 28 static-fire test that damaged the pad - because nothing says “lunar readiness” like a rocket going boom on the ground.