NASA Reroutes Orion to Low Lunar Orbit, Fixing a Flaw It Sat On for Years

NASA dropped a new concept of operations Friday showing Orion docking with Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit roughly 8,500 km above the Moon. But the agency isn't stopping there. It's also working toward the option of docking in low-lunar orbit, just a few hundred kilometers up, according to Jeremy Parsons, who manages the Artemis Program for NASA.

That lower perch matters. Parsons said it would slash the propellant Blue Moon needs to ferry astronauts down to the surface and back up, freeing mass for use elsewhere on the vehicle. It would also hand crews more frequent, faster chances to bail off the lunar surface if something goes wrong. In short, per Parsons, it makes a chunk of the landing job noticeably easier for Blue Origin.

To pull it off, NASA announced Friday it's teaming with United Launch Alliance on an "extended" version of the Centaur V upper stage. Paired with the Space Launch System's core stage, that stage would give Orion the juice to reach low-lunar orbit. This is the fix NASA long dodged: Orion's underpowered Service Module never had the delta-V to leave Earth, hit low-lunar orbit, and come home for a Pacific splashdown.

"Getting Orion to low-Lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said Friday. Instead of solving them, the agency had built workarounds, parking the Lunar Gateway in a near-rectilinear halo orbit Orion could actually reach and shoving the performance burden onto lunar landers and the companies building them.

Isaacman said NASA is now trying to help those lander partners wherever it can, given the pressure of the timeline. "We're listening to the data, and looking at what's happening around us," he said, describing questions about where partners are making progress and where they're struggling. "Their lives get easier if we can get Orion closer to the Moon, substantially."

The alternative, as Isaacman framed it, was to stay the course and hope the landers show up on schedule. NASA is choosing to "start turning those knobs" instead. Whether the extended Centaur V and a lower docking orbit arrive in time to matter is the next thing to watch.