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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket stands on its Florida launch pad. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Blue Origin is counting down to the debut of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, marking the first-ever orbital launch for Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old space venture.
Although Blue Origin has been launching much smaller New Shepard rockets on suborbital spaceflights for a decade, it has never put a payload into Earth orbit. That’s due to change with tonight’s liftoff from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Launch is scheduled to take place during a three-hour window that opens at 1 a.m. ET Sunday (10 p.m. PT Saturday). Blue Origin plans to stream coverage of the countdown starting about an hour before liftoff.
This will be the first launch in 20 years to take place at Launch Complex 36, which previously hosted Atlas rocket launches and has been leased by Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin since 2015.
New Glenn’s origin story goes back to 2012. Three years into the design and development effort, Bezos made a splash when he announced that the orbital-class rocket, named after pioneering NASA astronaut John Glenn, would be built at a 750,000-square-foot Florida factory and launched from Cape Canaveral.
The rocket stands more than 320 feet (98 meters) high and features a 7-meter (23-foot-wide) payload fairing, which Blue Origin says can provide twice the volume of a standard 5-meter fairing. An entire New Shepard rocket could fit within the fairing, with room to spare on the sides.
New Glenn’s first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, fueled with liquefied natural gas. The second stage makes use of two hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines. Maximum thrust at liftoff is 3.8 million pounds, which is about half the thrust that was generated by the Saturn V moon rockets of the Apollo era. The rocket should be able to put up to 99,000 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit, which is 50 percent more than NASA’s space shuttle could carry.
The road to space hasn’t always run smooth. For example, Blue Origin had to overcome problems that were encountered during development of New Glenn’s BE-4 rocket engines.
Company executives acknowledge that success isn’t guaranteed. “This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn, said last week. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”
The prime objective of this mission, known as NG-1, is to reach orbit safely with Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, a technology demonstration payload that’s designed to test the telemetry, communications and control systems for the company’s Blue Ring multi-mission space mobility platform. The test mission is part of the Defense Innovation Unit’s campaign to facilitate greater in-space mobility for the Pentagon. NG-1 will also serve as Blue Origin’s first certification flight for the Pentagon’s National Security Space Launch program.
This chart traces the stages of New Glenn’s planned flight. Click on the image for a larger version. (Blue Origin Infographic)
New Glenn’s second stage is slated to send the payload into a highly elliptical orbit that ranges from 1,490 to 12,000 miles (2,400 to 19,300 kilometers) in altitude. That’s presumably designed to test the capabilities of the in-space system and the ground-based infrastructure at those orbital heights.
Although it’s not a mission requirement, Blue Origin will attempt to have New Glenn’s first-stage booster fly itself back to an at-sea landing on a custom-built barge stationed hundreds of miles from shore in the Atlantic. The landing platform vessel has been christened Jacklyn as a tribute to Jeff Bezos’ mother.
The company passed up an opportunity for launch earlier this week due to concerns about high seas in the landing zone — and there’s always a chance that weather or technical problems will force yet another postponement. But in a posting to the X social-media platform, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp emphasized that the test mission’s success won’t depend on whether or not the booster sticks the landing.
“Our objective is to reach orbit. Anything beyond that is a bonus,” Limp said. “Landing our booster offshore is ambitious — but we’re going for it. No matter what, we will learn a lot.”
If New Glenn meets with success, that would mean more competition for SpaceX, which currently dominates the launch industry. Blue Origin says it has several New Glenn vehicles in production at its Florida factory, and has filled out a “full customer manifest” for launches in the months ahead.
High-profile missions include satellite launches to low Earth orbit for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and for AST SpaceMobile’s space-based cellular network. Looking farther out, New Glenn is due to launch twin orbiters to Mars for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission.
