Blue Origin
Blue Origin is set to begin the final stages of launch preparations for its New Glenn rocket on Monday, rolling the vehicle’s second stage to Launch Complex 36 in Florida. Weather and other final considerations could allow for a launch as early as Monday afternoon.
This is the flight version of the vehicle, minus the fixed adapters for weather protection during the test campaign. The launch company is aiming for a high-temperature fire test of the upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines, sometime next week or so.
The launch company, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is set to launch its first rocket, the massive New Glenn, which will be one of the world’s most powerful launch vehicles. Featuring a fully reusable first stage, New Glenn will have a lift capacity of 45 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Tight time to market
NASA is working with Blue Origin to send two relatively small spacecraft to Mars for the first launch of New Glenn, the ESCAPADE orbiter, which has a tight launch window of October 13 to October 21. Managed by the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will analyze the Martian magnetic field.
It’s unclear whether Blue Origin will be able to integrate, test, and launch ESCAPADE in less than six weeks. Between now and then, the company must successfully test-launch the second stage, then roll the first stage back to its facility at the Cape Canaveral Launch Complex.
The company’s plan is to combine the rocket’s second and first stages, add a payload fairing containing the spacecraft, and then conduct a short, hot-launch test of the first stage. If all goes well, Blue Origin plans to attempt a launch during the October window for ESCAPADE, which arrived at the company’s launch facility a few weeks ago.
That seems like an ambitious timeline for a new rocket, as final stage integration is often where problems are found on new launch vehicles. But Blue Origin has found a new sense of urgency under CEO Dave Limp, who joined the company in December. Hence the frenzied activity on the second stage over the Labor Day holiday weekend in the United States.
The road to commercial heavy lifting
Limp has led Amazon’s devices and services for more than a decade, including overseeing the Project Kuiper satellite project. During his nine months at Blue Origin, he prioritized the completion and launch of the New Glenn rocket among the company’s large portfolio of projects.
New Glenn will join SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets in the privately developed heavy-lift rocket race. Its debut will confirm the U.S. spaceflight trend toward reusable, commercially developed, large rockets. Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk both identify low-cost, rapidly reusable rockets as key to expanding human activity in space. Bezos wants mining and other destructive industrial activities to be moved off Earth to preserve the planet’s natural vitality.
Whether it launches ESCAPADE next month or another payload on its debut flight later in October, New Glenn will attempt to land an ambitious drone ship on its debut launch. The odds of success are slim: SpaceX hasn’t landed its first Falcon 9 in the ocean since its 23rd launch of the rocket.
But Bezos and Blue Origin are determined to gather all the data they can from New Glenn’s initial flight to achieve reusability of a larger booster as quickly as possible. Successful or not, the effort will make for compelling viewing.
