Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’s targeting the first-ever launch of its orbital-class New Glenn rocket for no earlier than the night of Jan. 9-10.
Liftoff is due to take place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36 in Florida. The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. ET Friday (10 p.m. PT Thursday), Blue Origin announced tonight. Video coverage of the countdown is set to be streamed via BlueOrigin.com starting about an hour before liftoff.
New Glenn, which is named after the late pioneer astronaut John Glenn, is due to launch Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, a payload that’s designed to test the communications, power and control systems for the company’s Blue Ring multi-use space platform. The test flight is part of a prototyping effort for orbital logistics that’s supported by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Blue Origin has been working on the development of New Glenn for more than a decade — and mission controllers are likely to be monitoring the performance of the two-stage rocket at least as closely as they’ll be monitoring the payload.
“This is our first flight, and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” said Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for the New Glenn program. “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.”
New Glenn 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. (For what it’s worth, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 can accommodate a 5.2-meter fairing, while its Starship super-rocket has a 9-meter fairing.)
The rocket’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.
After stage separation, New Glenn’s first-stage booster is designed to fly itself to a touchdown on a specially designed barge hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic — a barge that’s been christened Jacklyn as a tribute to Bezos’ mother. Blue Origin’s CEO, Dave Limp, says his team will attempt to recover the rocket after this week’s launch.
“We’re calling New Glenn’s first booster ‘So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,’” Limp wrote on the X social-media site in September. “Why? No one has landed a reusable booster on the first try. Yet, we’re going for it, and humbly submit having good confidence in landing it.”
A successful mission would address one of the most common criticisms leveled against Bezos and Blue Origin — that they’ve been in business for more than 20 years and have spent billions of dollars without putting anything in orbit. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was founded a couple of years after Blue Origin, has been far more successful in the orbital launch business. But if New Glenn enters commercial service soon, that could provide much more competition for SpaceX and other launch providers.
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 the launch of twin orbiters for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars.
And that’s just the start: This first launch, known as NG-1, will count toward certifying New Glenn for national security space launch contracts that could eventually be worth billions of dollars.
https://ift.tt/xAUPMO9 January 07, 2025 at 03:28AM GeekWire
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