Anyone who has tracked the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been waiting for signs of progress from the usually secretive space company. On Wednesday, engineers rolled a full-scale New Glenn rocket, partially made up of flight hardware, to a launch pad in Florida for ground testing.
The first New Glenn launch is almost certainly at least six months away, and it may not even happen this year. In the last few years, observers inside and outside the space industry have become accustomed to the nearly annual ritual of another New Glenn launch delay. New Glenn’s inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for later this year.
But it feels different now. Blue Origin is obviously moving closer to finally launching a rocket into orbit.
Scaling up
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder, was at Cape Canaveral to see his giant new rocket on the launch pad for the first time. “Just incredible to see New Glenn on the pad at LC-36,” Bezos wrote on Instagram. “Big year ahead. Let’s go!”
Starting late last year, Blue Origin officials doubled down on the company’s plans to launch the first New Glenn test flight by the end of 2024. This messaging coincided with the arrival of Dave Limp as Blue Origin’s chief executive, replacing Bob Smith, whose seven-year tenure included the first human suborbital flights on the company’s New Shepard rocket. Smith’s time as CEO was also marked by repeated delays on the New Glenn rocket.
Limp is pushing Blue Origin to move faster, and it seems the company’s employees got the memo. In December, the company rolled elements of the New Glenn rocket from its factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to a final assembly hangar located about nine miles away at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Inside that building, technicians connected the first stage booster, which is flight hardware, with an upper stage Blue Origin has set aside for ground testing. The final piece of the rocket to be added was a 23-foot-diameter (7-meter) payload fairing, the uppermost section of New Glenn designed to protect spacecraft during the initial phase of launch.
Last week, Blue Origin lifted a structure simulating the rocket’s empty mass vertical using the transporter-erector arm at Launch Complex 36 (LC-36), a former Atlas launch pad Blue Origin took over in 2015. This was a final validation of the lifting arm at LC-36 before Blue Origin put a real, or mostly real, rocket on the pad.
On Wednesday, ground crews rolled a fully assembled New Glenn rocket out of the hangar at LC-36 and up the ramp to the launch mount. Then, the hydraulic lifting arm raised the two-stage launcher vertically. At more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, New Glenn is one of the largest rockets ever seen on Florida’s Space Coast, roughly the same height as NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and nearly as tall as the Saturn V used in the Apollo program.
“The upending is one in a series of major manufacturing and integrated test milestones in preparation for New Glenn’s first launch later this year,” Blue Origin officials wrote in an update on Wednesday. “The test campaign enables our teams to practice, validate, and increase proficiency in vehicle integration, transport, ground support, and launch operations.”
New Glenn can haul nearly 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of payload into low-Earth orbit. For low-altitude orbits, this is a weight class above the uppermost capability of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket but below SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin also plans to use the New Glenn rocket to launch lunar landers to the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program.
New Glenn’s first stage booster is reusable, and is designed to land on an offshore barge in the Atlantic Ocean, which will bring it back to the coast, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon 9 booster.
“The fairing is large enough to hold three school buses,” Blue Origin said. “Its reusable first stage aims for a minimum of 25 missions and will land on a sea-based platform located roughly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange.”
Blue Origin is now 24 years old and employs around 11,000 people at locations around the country, with major locations in Washington, Texas, Florida, and Alabama. While the company has not yet launched anything into orbit, Blue Origin is working on a wide range of projects aside from rockets, including cargo and human-rated lunar landers for NASA and a space tug that could move payloads into different orbits for the US military. New Glenn is crucial for all of these plans.
Blue Origin’s latest progress with New Glenn comes as Bezos’s space company appears to be on the verge of buying United Launch Alliance from Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Trying times
Getting New Glenn to the launch pad is a major milestone for Blue Origin. This is undoubtedly a turning point for the privately funded New Glenn program, but there is a lot left to do before the rocket is ready to fly.
The next step will involve “several demonstrations of cryogenic fluid loading, pressure control, and the vehicle’s venting systems,” Blue Origin said. According to a report published by Aviation Week, Blue Origin will load this particular test vehicle with cryogenic liquid nitrogen as a stand-in for the super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants used by the first stage booster on an actual launch. The upper stage won’t be loaded during this upcoming Integrated Tanking Test (ITT).
The primary purpose of these initial tests is to validate Blue Origin’s launch pad and ground systems function as designed.
There are no engines on this New Glenn test vehicle. Blue Origin plans to wrap up testing in the next few months on the seven methane-fueled BE-4 booster engines and two hydrogen-burning BE-3U upper stage engines slated to fly on the first New Glenn rocket.
If all goes according to plan, Blue Origin should complete the Integrated Tanking Test within a few weeks. The rocket will then roll off the launch pad to allow technicians to install the booster’s engine compartment with the seven BE-4s. New Glenn will also need a new upper stage before returning to LC-36 for a hotfire of the seven BE-4 engines, a milestone Aviation Week said is scheduled for this summer.
Each BE-4 engine can generate 550,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle. Seven of them combined will produce more than 3.8 million pounds of thrust. Blue Origin can already claim the BE-4 engine is flight-proven, following their seemingly flawless performance on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket last month.
However, there are some design differences between the BE-4s flown on Vulcan and the BE-4s assigned to New Glenn. For one thing, the BE-4s on New Glenn are designed to be reusable from the start, with Blue Origin attempting to recover the booster at sea beginning with the first New Glenn flight. ULA eventually wants to make its Vulcan rocket partially reusable, but for at least the next few years, the BE-4s on Vulcan will be single-use.
Blue Origin initially plans to operate with a rotation of four reusable New Glenn boosters, each flying as often as every 30 days, according to Aviation Week.
The company has not announced a firm schedule for the debut of New Glenn other than sometime later this year. The first New Glenn test flight will likely carry a pair of small NASA satellites bound for Mars, an agency official said in November.
This NASA mission, called ESCAPADE, is on contract with Blue Origin for a launch date in August 2024. However, this schedule is under review. New Glenn’s massive lift capability is overkill for the two ESCAPADE spacecraft, each about the size of a mini-fridge, so engineers are studying the possibility of using New Glenn to send the missions directly to Mars rather than launching them into an initial orbit around Earth.
Changing the trajectory for ESCAPADE would allow for a launch date later this year. The mission must launch in 2024, with Earth and Mars in the right positions in the Solar System, or else wait until 2026.
Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn, told Aviation Week he is confident in flying the rocket this year. “We’re launching this year. It’s happening,” Jones said. “Our plan is to launch twice this year.”