Barcelona Moon Team travelled last week to the HQ of China Great Wall Industry Corporation in Beijing. The main target of these series of meetings was to close details about the propulsion system that will be integrated in the BMT lander flight model early next year.

The LM has a single pulsed/variable high thrust main engine and several smaller attitude control thrusters, all of them bipropellant (UDMH with oxidizer N2O4). The main engine is a 1600N/1200N with re-startability capability to perform capture, de-orbit, break and descent/landing. The S/C attitude and control is provided by eight 22N small thrusters.

One of the main subjects for discussion about integrating a Chinese propulsion system in the BMT lander is exporting issues. The baseline of the mission is currently to build the structure of the lander module in Spain and export it to China for integration of the propulsion system. After that, the lander would travel back to Spain to integrate all the electronics and execute the AIT campaign, after which it would travel again to China for assembly on top of the LM2C-CTS2 for launch.

If export issues cannot be solved, a team of Spanish engineers will travel to China for some months to integrate the electronics there and also execute the AIT campaign in hired facilities. Not a bad plan anyway!