Jeff Bezos

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Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket finally makes an appearance on the launch pad

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Integrated —

Blue Origin plans a tanking test at Cape Canaveral, then a hotfire on the launch pad.

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Dave Limp, Blue Origin's new CEO, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Enlarge / Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s new CEO, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

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.

The first full-scale New Glenn rocket rolls out at Launch Complex 36.

Enlarge / The first full-scale New Glenn rocket rolls out at Launch Complex 36.

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.

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Jeff Bezos says what we’re all thinking: “Blue Origin needs to be much faster”

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Orbit, finally? —

“We’re going to become the world’s most decisive company across any industry.”

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Jeff Bezos holding aviation glasses up to his face.

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, shortly after he rode on New Shepard to space.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gives very few interviews, but he recently sat down with the computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman for a two-hour interview about Amazon, Blue Origin, his business practices, and more.

The discussion meanders somewhat, but there are some interesting tidbits about spaceflight, especially when the conversation turns to Blue Origin. This is the space company Bezos founded more than 23 years ago. He has invested an extraordinary amount of money into Blue Origin—likely somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion—and it truly is a passion project.

But the inescapable truth about Blue Origin is that to date, it has been a disappointment in terms of execution. At present, Blue Origin employs approximately 11,000 people, about the same total as SpaceX. However, Blue Origin has launched zero rockets this year, whereas SpaceX has launched nearly 100, as well as building and launching thousands of satellites.

During the interview, Bezos candidly acknowledged this. “Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it’s one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago,” he said. “I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we’re going to.”

Becoming a decisive company

How is Blue Origin going to speed up?

“We’re going to become the world’s most decisive company across any industry,” he said. “We’re going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we’ll study them, but let’s go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind.”

When discussing Blue Origin, it’s almost impossible not to compare the company to SpaceX, which also has a prominent billionaire founder, Elon Musk. Bezos’ comments about being decisive are striking because that is one of the secrets to SpaceX’s success. During technical meetings, Musk will make a decision and accept the responsibility for that decision when it comes to key questions. Then, without hesitation, the company moves down that path until it finds success or realizes it has followed the wrong path and course-corrects.

The key is to make a decision, try something, and move on. Decisiveness is the antithesis of how many corporations make decisions, with multiple layers of middle management, or government agencies and their endless committees and meetings.

Bezos recently got rid of Bob Smith, who had served as Blue Origin’s CEO for half a decade. Smith’s tenure was marked by tentativeness. Now that Bezos has hired Dave Limp, a former Amazon executive to run Blue Origin, this move toward decisiveness could help Blue Origin move faster.

The company may finally be on the cusp of tangible results. During the interview, Bezos said he was optimistic about finally reaching orbit. The company’s large New Glenn rocket is nearing readiness, and Bezos did not seek to dampen expectations. “I’m very optimistic that the first launch of new Glenn will be in 2024,” he said. This echoes comments Ars reported on from another Blue Origin official, Lars Hoffman, earlier this week.

What does he think about Musk?

Bezos said a lot of the company’s focus has been not just on getting the first New Glenn rocket ready at Blue Origin’s factory in Florida but on building up the capacity to fly two dozen a year. “Rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place,” he said.

This includes building two dozen upper stages—each of which is powered by two BE-3U engines—a year because second-stage reuse is not in the company’s immediate plans.

“We’re going to work on manufacturing that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible,” Bezos said. “There are two paths for a second stage: make it reusable or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it. And that trade is actually not obvious which one is better.” In his remarks, Bezos did not reference the company’s experiments with an experimental reusable upper stage called Project Jarvis.

Bezos also took the high road when asked about Musk, who has puerilely suggested before that Bezos “couldn’t get it up” because Blue Origin lacked an orbital rocket.

“Well, I don’t really know Elon very well,” Bezos said. “I know his public persona. But I also know you can’t know anyone by their public persona. It’s impossible. I mean, you may think you do, but I guarantee you don’t. In terms of judging him by the results, he must be a very capable leader. There’s no way you could have Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader. It’s impossible.”

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Blue Origin sure seems confident it will launch New Glenn in 2024

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Place your bets —

Does Jeff Bezos’s heavy-lift rocket really have a shot at launching next year?

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This picture, taken several months ago, shows different parts for Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket inside the company's manufacturing facility in Florida.

Enlarge / This picture, taken several months ago, shows different parts for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket inside the company’s manufacturing facility in Florida.

Blue Origin

For the first time, it’s starting to feel like Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, might have a shot at launching its long-delayed New Glenn rocket within the next 12 months.

Of course, there’s a lot for Blue Origin to test and validate before New Glenn is ready to fly. First, the company’s engineers need to fully assemble a New Glenn rocket and raise it on the company’s sprawling seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There’s a good chance of this happening in the coming months as Blue Origin readies for a series of tanking tests and simulated countdowns at the launch site.

It’s tempting to invoke Berger’s Law, the guideline championed by my Ars colleague which states that if a launch is scheduled for the fourth quarter of a calendar year—and if it is at least six months away—the launch will delay into the next year. Given Blue Origin’s history of New Glenn delays, that’s probably the safer bet. New Glenn’s inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for 2024.

But it’s worth noting that Blue Origin has been consistent in its 2024 launch schedule for New Glenn for a while now, and on Tuesday, a senior Blue Origin official doubled down on this goal for the debut of New Glenn. There are also several signs beyond statements from Blue Origin that the company is making real progress with its new rocket.

The two-stage New Glenn will stand more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, with the capability to haul nearly 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of payload into low-Earth orbit, according to Blue Origin. 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.

A NASA official last month said the agency anticipates putting one of its robotic Mars missions on the first flight of Blue Origin’s new rocket next year. The Mars science mission, named ESCAPADE, consists of two small identical spacecraft to study the Martian magnetosphere. It is relatively low in cost, and NASA is willing to accept some risk in launching it on the first New Glenn flight, but if it doesn’t depart Earth next year, the mission faces a two-year delay.

Lars Hoffman, Blue Origin’s vice president of government sales, gave a high-level overview of the privately-developed New Glenn rocket during a presentation Tuesday to the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in Orlando.

“We’re now ready to really start amping things up a bit,” Hoffman said. “We’ll start launching New Glenn next year.”

What to watch for in 2024

Hoffman showed a video inside Blue Origin’s New Glenn manufacturing plant near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a few miles away from the launch site at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin intends to use most of the parts visible inside, which included tanks and other metallic structures, on real flightworthy New Glenn rockets, he said. Some of the equipment will be used for qualification testing on the ground.

“The manufacturing pace is just picking up by the day,” Hoffman told the gathering of Space Force officials. “This is all flight hardware that we’re going to fly on our first launches next year. There’s some qual hardware in there as well, but things are picking up very fast. In fact, we’re expanding the buildings there to support that scaling.”

In the last few weeks, photographers have caught glimpses of New Glenn’s payload fairing traveling on a transporter down a road near Cape Canaveral. The clamshell-like fairing has a diameter of 23 feet (7 meters) and a height of more than 70 feet (21.9 meters), with roughly twice the volume as a typical payload shroud flown on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket, according to Hoffman.

The fairing is now inside Blue Origin’s hangar near the New Glenn launch pad, Hoffman said. A large section of a New Glenn first stage booster, complete with Blue Origin livery, was also spotted just outside the manufacturing complex in Florida. When asked by Ars on Tuesday, Hoffman declined to confirm if this booster is slated for the first New Glenn flight, or if it is a ground test unit, but he said most of what Blue Origin has shown inside the factory is flight hardware.

“With our launch site right next door, it makes it very easy for us to build the rocket, transport it right to the launch site at our integration facility, with payload processing right nearby, all of it right there together,” Hoffman said.

Construction at the New Glenn launch pad, located on a site once used to launch Atlas rockets, is now complete, according to Hoffman. The pad is one of the largest launch sites at the Florida spaceport. “It is just ready to go, and we’ll put it to good use starting next year.”

An artist's rendering of a New Glenn rocket in flight.

Enlarge / An artist’s rendering of a New Glenn rocket in flight.

Over the next few months, Hoffman said Blue Origin plans to ramp up engine testing ahead of the debut launch of New Glenn. This will include firings of the methane-fueled BE-4 engine and the hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engine on a test stand in Alabama. Seven BE-4s will power the first stage of New Glenn, and two BE-3Us will be on the second stage.

Similar versions of both of these engines will be flight-proven by the time New Glenn finally takes off. The BE-3U is a different variant of the BE-3 engine used on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket, and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket will use two BE-4 engines from Blue Origin on each of its first stage boosters.

One of the most significant milestones leading up to the debut of New Glenn will be out of Blue Origin’s hands. Hoffman identified the first launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket with its BE-4 engines, now planned for January, as one of the key events in the run-up to the maiden flight of New Glenn.

Hoffman didn’t provide a specific timeline, but he told Ars that Blue Origin’s gound teams in Florida are preparing to raise a New Glenn rocket vertical on its launch pad for a series of cryogenic propellant loading tests. These tests, sometimes called “wet dress rehearsals,” will include filling the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen propellants. Recent history with other new rockets suggests minor problems can stretch out these tests for months.

Two Blue Origin officials told Ars that the company is not currently planning to perform a full-scale test-firing of an entire New Glenn booster, with all seven of its BE-4 engines, before the inaugural launch. If this holds, it would be unusual. These hotfire tests are a standard part of preparing of the first flight of a new rocket. Just this year, we’ve seen ULA test-fire its Vulcan booster, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket go through multiple hotfire tests, and SpaceX’s enormous Super Heavy booster fire up its engines on the launch pad.

Blue Origin does plan to test-fire New Glenn’s second stage before the inaugural launch, the officials said.

Hoffman didn’t narrow down the schedule for the first flight of New Glenn beyond some time next year, but NASA’s ESCAPADE mission tentatively slated to fly on it is on contract for a launch date in August 2024. However, this schedule is under review, according to Laura Aguiar, a NASA spokesperson.

The official launch schedule in August would have the New Glenn rocket place the two ESCAPADE probes into an orbit around Earth, leaving the spacecraft themselves to perform the final maneuvers to escape Earth’s gravity and fly to Mars. Aguiar told Ars there are other options available, including using the ample lift capability of New Glenn to send the twin probes directly to Mars on a trajectory known as a Hohmann transfer, allowing for a launch date later next year.

“The NASA team, in conjunction with our spacecraft and rocket partners, are constantly evaluating alternative trajectory profiles that optimize the availability and flexibility of our launch opportunities,” Aguiar said in a written statement. “Some of these alternatives involve a more traditional (Hohmann) planetary transfer, which allows for launch availability further into 2024.”

Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2000, now has approximately 11,000 employees, primarily at locations in suburban Seattle, West Texas, Huntsville, Alabama, and Cape Canaveral. Although it has never launched anything into orbit, Blue Origin is one of two companies competing in the suborbital space tourism and research market, alongside Virgin Galactic. Blue Origin has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop a human-rated Moon lander to carry astronauts to the lunar surface on one of the agency’s Artemis missions.

Blue Origin also wants to join ULA and SpaceX in launching the US military’s most critical national security space missions. And Amazon, where Bezos made his fortune, wants to launch a large number of its Kuiper Internet satellites on Blue Origin rockets.

A new chief executive, Dave Limp, will take the reins at Blue Origin this month from Bob Smith, who oversaw a period of vast growth in employee headcount. Despite this, the company fell further behind its main competitor, SpaceX.

The orbital-class New Glenn is a centerpiece of making Bezos’s space ambitions a reality. Its first stage is designed to be reusable from the start to reduce launch costs and improve launch cadence. Hoffman said Blue Origin aims to recover the booster on a floating offshore platform beginning with the first flight. Blue Origin recently delivered a large fixture to Port Canaveral, Florida, to help rotate landed New Glenn boosters from a vertical to a horizontal position after returning to shore.

Blue Origin eventually intends to recover and reuse the entire rocket. “We are on a path to full reusability in the long term, and that’s the goal,” Hoffman said.

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