Blue Moon’s 2025 Moon Landing: Nope

In early March 2024, 60 Minutes released a piece about NASA’s Artemis plans. It started with NASA’s inspector general questioning the U.S. space agency’s Artemis campaign’s sustainability but ended with a surprise pronouncement from Blue Origin’s John Couluris:

“SpaceX has done some amazing things. And they've changed the narrative for access to space. And Blue Origin's looking to do the same. This lander, we're expecting to land on the Moon between 12 and 16 months from today.”

The 60 Minutes program aired on March 3, 2024. The Couluris interview probably occurred at least a few weeks prior, possibly a month or more. Assuming the interview was conducted in February 2024 (at the latest), then based on Couluris’ assertion, Blue Origin's Blue Moon version 1 should be touching down on the lunar surface as early as January/February 2025 or as late as June/July 2025.

Considering Blue Origin’s current circumstances and history, Couluris’ Blue Moon prognostication seems overly ambitious. One reason to approach his statements with caution is Blue Origin’s slow development pacing, which is deeply steeped in its company culture. Because of this pacing, Blue Origin’s history, aside from New Shepard, is a trail of missed goals. 

Another reason is that Blue Moon relies on a ghost rocket, New Glenn, to get to the Moon. There’s also the rumor that Blue Origin will acquire the United Launch Alliance, a move that will complicate its lunar lander plans. Any of those circumstances would be a challenge for a company to overcome. 

Missed Goals and Slow Pacing

Blue Origin has missed its goals for New Glenn’s first launch several times over the years. 

It’s good for a company to have goals. Goals give everyone in the company an aspirational aimpoint, allowing them to pull together towards that goal and achieve it. But it’s not enough to establish a goal; it must also be grounded. Some of that grounding comes from a company’s history of how it has fulfilled previous promises. If a company routinely hits its goals, then people expect that the company will meet its next stated goal.

However, if a company keeps missing goals, people (including company employees) dismiss whatever goal the company says it will hit the next time (like the villagers in The Boy Who Cried Wolf). Sometimes, just missing a goal once will cause negative expectations to take root. 

Blue Origin has failed to hit its public goals for its biggest space project, New Glenn. However, the company’s failure to hit launch goals is not unlike that of other launch companies.  Many fail to deliver a launch vehicle outright. Others exceed their launch goal timelines but eventually launch.

Blue Origin initially hyped New Glenn to be launched in 2020. Since then, the company has made several “no earlier than” projections, resulting in no New Glenn launches. The strangeness of Blue Origin’s failure to hit its launch goals is especially evident when considering its founder and patron, Jeff Bezos.

Bezos founded another company, Amazon, in 1994 and grew it into an internet market juggernaut. Between its founding and April 2024, the company has been operating and growing. Just establishing and operating a business is hard, considering how many companies die within three years of their founding. Bezos’ success with Amazon is a laudable achievement.

Based on that success, Bezos understands what it takes to get a company up and running. He knows how to establish executable goals, which is why Blue Origin’s operation is so puzzling. It’s almost as if Bezos threw away his business acumen because…space? He founded Blue Origin in 2000, six years after Amazon. Unlike Amazon, the company has remained focused on development and not delivery since then. 

Tortoise Soup and “No” Glenn

Some of this slow pacing is intentionally different from Amazon. Bezos has indicated that the company’s slow rocket development is a feature, not a bug. Blue Origin is proud of its slow approach to rocket development, which is highlighted in its company motto, gradatim ferociter (step by step ferociously). The company’s go-slow approach is baked into its culture. It will be challenging for the company to move from a sluglike culture to one of speedy confidence. 

That slow culture also impacts Blue Origin’s other programs, including the Blue Moon lunar lander. Employees in all divisions were probably hired because they seemed to fit well in Blue Origin’s culture (among many qualifications). Despite Couluris’ stated goal, the company’s culture overrides it without thought. Changing company culture does not happen overnight, and attempting to do so would increase the time required to land Blue Moon.  Whether because of its current culture or adopting a new one, Blue Moon will not land on the Moon in the stated timeframe.

We’re approaching mid-2024 and New Glenn has yet to be test-launched a single time. The fact that Blue Origin’s rocket hasn’t been launched makes Couluris’ Blue Moon goal questionable. He seems to believe that Blue Origin is willing to launch Blue Moon with a rocket with unknown reliability. It’s not that New Glenn is a bad or a good rocket; it’s just that a lack of any launches makes it difficult to know if it’s a bad or a good rocket. 

However, the lack of reliability data about New Glenn is a problem. Launching Blue Moon, a high-cost Blue Origin project, on a rocket during its first year of operation seems about as bright as launching an expensive government probe on the H3’s first launch. Since Blue Origin is full of intelligent people in a slow culture, it’s likely the company would take its time to identify fresh New Glenn issues before using it to transport Blue Moon. 

It’s unclear whether New Glenn will require at least three launches (like SpaceX’s Starship) to reach space. Maybe its first launch will be as successful as the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) first Vulcan launch. If Blue Origin experiences a failure with New Glenn, it will take the company more time to understand its cause. Again, the company’s slow culture will cause it to take longer to conduct the failure investigation. 

A New Glenn launch failure would cause a lengthy launch pause. That conjecture is based on Blue Origin’s New Glenn development pacing and its six-month-long investigation of its New Shepard failure. The company’s pedantic approach to its rocket development processes points to how it would implement similarly systematic approaches to a New Glenn failure.

Blue Origin started working on its lander later than New Glenn. In many ways, the lander is a much more complicated proposition for the company than New Glenn. One of the significant challenges is the lack of real-world experience with lunar landings. So far, commercial lander companies’ efforts have demonstrated…challenges…to landing a vehicle on the Moon. 

Assuming Blue Origin learns from those earlier landing attempts and Blue Moon lands without incident, the company must demonstrate more than the ability to land on the Moon. It also must show payload unloading operations, payload functionality tests, etc.

Additionally, Blue Origin wants Blue Moon to launch from the Moon. Very few have accomplished lunar landings and then taken off from the Moon. Perhaps everything goes perfectly with Blue Moon, but the attempts from other companies show that’s unlikely. 

The Juggling Tortoise

However, Blue Origin’s biggest challenge facing Blue Moon will come if and when it tries to buy ULA. 

First, there’s the possibility that Blue Origin won’t be allowed to buy ULA. While two companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, are capable of launching large upmass-capable rockets and might be seen as better than SpaceX alone, three might be believed as better for launch market health. The U.S. government and military might determine that all three companies better serve the U.S. launch market than two. Just getting merger permission might take a while, and there is no outcome guarantee.

If the acquisition moves forward, Blue Origin will take years to integrate ULA with itself after closing the merger. Post-merger integrations are the actions that each company must take to become one cohesive, well-functioning company. Consulting companies agree that these post-merger integrations are essential to a merger’s success. Clearly, ULA survived a similar process when Boeing and Lockheed Martin created it.

Post-merger integrations involve more than believing the deal is perfect because “both companies build rockets.” Hopefully, Blue Origin and ULA will have performed due diligence correctly without being blinded by the merger’s seeming positives. What are the negatives of having a fleet of rockets that use the same engine? Does having a disposable rocket in the fleet alongside a reusable one make sense? Having two rockets essentially doubles supply requirements. Is Blue Origin ready for that?

The integration will include mundane actions such as figuring out which payroll system makes sense to use (or if a new one is necessary). Do Blue Origin’s and ULA’s safety practices in launch facilities match up, or does one have better procedures? 

The biggest post-integration challenge will be the culture clashes. ULA has its own work culture. Strangely, even though ULA is six years younger than Blue Origin, it has a history of accomplishments that Blue Origin can only hope to attain. ULA employees might be unwilling to move away from work culture norms that contributed to the company’s successes. 

Some of their cultures may have similarities: ULA also tends to move slowly in its business. Even with that commonality, their cultures might still be more different than people realize, as ULA still moved faster than Blue Origin. ULA managed to launch Vulcan before Blue Origin launched New Glenn. ULA missed its stated launch goals, but one reason for its misses was that Vulcan had to wait for Blue Origin BE-4 engines.

Another cultural challenge is Blue Origin’s reported attitudes in the workplace, including possible sexism problems and questionable safety attitudes. ULA has had to deal with cases for both, which is unsurprising for any large company. However, ULA’s leadership appears more protective of its workforce, less tolerant of sexual harassment, and more encouraging of safety.

Post-merger integration activities are challenging for companies that are not in the middle of developing new rockets and landers. Blue Origin is juggling both and has yet to bring either New Glenn or Blue Moon (which requires New Glenn) to fruition. Adding in a potential merger will complicate those two activities.

Aside from company talent and contracts, it's also unclear what Blue Origin gains from acquiring ULA. ULA has a functional rocket—the Vulcan. However, it uses engines supplied by Blue Origin, which Blue Origin would instead use on New Glenn. Even though the Vulcan was successfully launched, it can’t be used to launch Blue Moon. If New Glenn isn’t launched this year, a ULA acquisition would at least provide a functional rocket for Blue Origin’s immediate use. But Blue Moon would still be waiting on New Glenn to take it to the Moon.

On the one hand, Blue Origin may land Blue Moon in 2025. However, based on the company’s embrace of moving slowly, its history of missing its goals, the fact it still hasn’t launched the rocket that Blue Moon needs to get to the Moon and a potential acquisition that would be challenging to any company in the best of times, Couluris’ statements seem quite hype-ful. What’s likely to happen is that Blue Moon will land on the Moon much later, but hopefully more often than once in a blue moon. 

While it’s not clear that Blue Moon will land on the Moon next year, it is clear that many companies are working to make commercial lunar exploration (and maybe settlement) a reality. Their missions are ambitious, and the scope of their activities and investments can be challenging to track, which is where Astralytical can help.

Astralytical’s team is focused on the business of the Moon. We understand that it will take decades of effort and more than one company funded by a wealthy enthusiast to build the infrastructure that will make any Moon endeavor successful. 

Images Source: Copilot Designer, Generated with AI, March 29, 2024. https://copilot.microsoft.com/

John Holst is the Editor/Analyst of Ill-Defined Space, dedicated to analysis of activities, policies, and businesses in the space sector.

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