With all eyes on SpaceX’s efforts to get the Starship super rocket operational, many would be forgiven for imagining that Elon Musk’s company is all that exists in commercial space.
But other companies are also making strides that will help open the frontier of space to human activity and development. Some of that progress has to do not so much with how humans will return to the moon as with how they will live there.
One of the projects being undertaken by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is a device called Blue Alchemist. It is an attempt to access the moon’s natural resources in a single process and transform them into useful materials for future lunar settlers.
Blue Alchemist was awarded a $35 million NASA tipping point contract in July 2023 as a way to make solar cells out of lunar regolith. It had already been under development since 2021.
The process involves subjecting lunar regolith to extreme heat and then separating materials such as oxygen, silicon, iron and aluminum. Silicon, the building material for solar cells, is said to be 99.999 percent pure.
Recently, Blue Origin announced that Blue Alchemist has passed a critical design review. The company has offered no word yet when a prototype will be flown to the surface of the moon for tests under lunar conditions.
The proposition that future lunar settlers will have to live off the land as much as possible has been a truism for decades. The cost of transporting oxygen, water, food and building materials from the Earth to the moon is simply too steep, even given reductions in launch costs achieved by companies such as SpaceX, to sustain a lunar settlement.
Blue Alchemist is an attempt to solve that living off the land problem. According to Blue Origin, the technology will enable:
- Breathable oxygen to support multiple astronauts for short to extended missions on the lunar surface
- Low-cost lunar and cis-lunar (the area of space between Earth and the Moon) exploration refueled with oxygen from regolith, with immediate cost reduction opportunities
- Near-term economic transformation of space exploration through sustainable commercial ventures
- Permanent robotic and human lunar settlements powered entirely by locally made solar arrays
- Mars habitation and exploration using the same resource transformation principles
- Deep space exploration with refueling and resupply stations built from lunar regolith, and later asteroid material
Blue Alchemist is not a complete solution to sustaining a lunar settlement. Settlers will still have to mine lunar ice, for example, for water.
Also, NASA’s recent decision to deploy a small nuclear reactor to power a lunar settlement may complicate the need to make solar cells. One answer is that a lunar settlement cannot have too much power and that more than one source, i.e. nuclear and solar, would be safer than relying on just one.
Blue Origin has, at least until now, been an also-run commercial space company, existing in SpaceX’s shadow. To be sure, Blue Origin’s New Shepard has been making suborbital jaunts, taking passengers, including luminaries such as William Shatner, Katy Perry, and Ed Dwight to the edge of space.
The larger, orbital rocket, New Glenn, has had one test flight and plans at least another before the end of 2025.
The second New Glenn launch will deliver a NASA payload, the twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) probes to Mars. ESCAPADE will study the Red Planet’s magnetosphere to determine how solar wind tore away its atmosphere, ending whatever life might have evolved there, billions of years ago.
The Blue Moon lunar lander is in development. The Mark 1 uncrewed version of Blue Moon is due to be launched in 2026. The Mark II crewed version is currently scheduled for the Artemis V mission in 2030.
Blue Alchemist remains an unsung project being developed by the commercial space sector. It will not only help future lunar settlers be self-sufficient but will help provide raw materials for space-based manufacturing facilities.
Thus, a cis-lunar economy will be born that could change space exploration from an expensive hobby that great nations indulge in, to a profit-making enterprise.
Vehicles such as the Starship Human Landing System and Blue Moon will get humans back on the lunar surface. Technology such as Blue Alchemist will allow them to change the history of the world by making the return to the moon pay for the betterment of all humankind.
Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
