Blue Ring Spacecraft Adaptation for Large Payload Delivery, Hosting, and Relay Commercial Services at Mars
Blue Origin's first Blue Ring spacecraft is currently being assembled in Huntsville Alabama. This spacecraft is intended to be the first in a long commercial product line optimized for delivery and hosting of geostationary and cislunar transfers payloads; but it can be adapted for Mars missions with minimal modifications to the product line. The Blue Ring propulsion system can deliver more than one ton of payloads to low Mars orbit, areosynchronous, or a variety of other Martian orbits in under 2.5 years. This payload capacity can be distributed between a mixture of up to 13 hosted or separable payloads with industry standard interfaces. Blue Ring can provide significant power at Mars, distributed amongst hosted payloads, along with data and telecommunication services. Additionally, the Blue Ring based mobility platform can be configured with communications capabilities to provide Mars Relay services to both surface and in-orbit science systems. Blue Ring's combination of flexibility, modularity, and substantial available resources enables exciting new, commercially enabled, missions for Mars.
Authors
- Silvia Giron Viesca
- James E. Hurtt
- Ian Elliott (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8747-6447)
- Ronald Lee (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9755-0436)
- Thomas Randolph
- Sutinee Sujittosakul
- Ryan Webb
- T. W. L. Sanford
- Michael D. Bryant (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8695-458X)
- D. Hinds
Institutions
- Blue Wave Semiconductors (United States) (US)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-03-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/aero63441.2025.11068571
- Primary Topic
- Spacecraft Dynamics and Control
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- California Institute of Technology
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory