launch

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.”

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.