Blue Origin’s New Glenn
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has a suborbital rocket in New Shepard, but the Amazon billionaire still hasn’t lobbed a rocket to Earth orbit. And instead of taking an iterative, SpaceX-like approach to spaceflight, Bezos is vying for the immediate slam dunk with New Glenn, a gigantic future rocket named in honor of NASA astronaut John Glenn. Blue Origin has been working on the $2.5 billion heavy-lift rocket since 2014, and, like so many other pending rockets, its development has been subject to multiple delays. New Glenn is slated to launch later this year, but we’ll believe it when we see it.
The 313-foot-tall (95-meter) rocket features a reusable first stage that’s powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines. The booster is capable of exerting 3.85 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, the company claims. The second stage’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines are a modified version of ones used on New Shepard. Once operational, New Glenn will hoist 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit. Blue Origin expects around 25 flights from the lower stage before they get retired. NASA is already counting on the unflown rocket to launch a mission to Mars next year, so Blue Origin needs to get cracking.
