Blue Origin's lunar lander mockup is ready for NASA Artemis astronaut training

NASA's Orion space capsule training simulator is located inside Building 9 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It's a full-scale, high-fidelity model of the real thing, and where the Artemis 2 astronauts spent more than a year preparing for their recent mission around the moon. For a long time, the Orion simulator sat alone in its own corner, away from the group of International Space Station training modules lined up inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF). But now, Orion has a neighbor. A mockup of Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lunar lander has been assembled at the SVMF, and is ready for astronauts to come aboard to begin training, according to a NASA release . Standing adjacent to the Orion capsule, the Blue Moon crew cabin and exterior resemble the design of the lander's Mark 2 variant, which will eventually land Artemis astronauts on the moon , if all goes according to plan. With Blue Origin's mockup now assembled at JSC, astronauts can now seamlessly transition from training inside Orion to training in Blue Moon as they prepare for the Artemis missions ahead. The next mission, Artemis 3 , is dependent on at least one lunar lander being ready to fly before the mission can launch. Blue Moon is one of two lunar landers NASA has chosen through the agency's Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, the other being SpaceX's Starship , and is a critical component of NASA's Artemis program that aims to establish a permanent presence on the moon's surface. …