Will this lander carry humans to the moon? Dynetics unveils lunar mock-up - Space.com

Related: NASA unveils plan for Artemis 'base camp' on the moon beyond 2024.

That mission, broadly speaking, is NASA's Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration.

(Over the long haul, NASA wants these surface sorties to depart from a small, moon-orbiting space station called Gateway. But the 2024 mission may not use Gateway.).

In April of this year, the space agency announced that it had awarded contracts to three private groups — Dynetics, SpaceX and The National Team, led by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin — to develop their crewed lander concepts.

The agency wants at least one of the spacecraft to be up and running by 2024, when the Artemis 3 mission is scheduled to make its historic lunar landing.

(Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 will be uncrewed and crewed trips around the moon, respectively. They're targeted to launch in late 2021 and 2023.).

The National Team's design incorporates elements of Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo spacecraft and NASA's Orion capsule, for which team member Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor.

The four-astronaut lander being developed by Dynetics, a subsidiary of technology and engineering company Leidos, is about the same size as the Apollo lunar lander, Dynetics representatives said. .

Three Vulcan Centaur launches will be required for each mission, in fact — one each to loft the lander and its two external fuel tanks, Dynetics representatives said on Tuesday (Sept. 15) during a webinar hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.