By Jackie Wattles, CNN
(CNN) — On a Florida launchpad that has been dormant for almost two decades, a new, roughly 320-foot (98-meter) rocket — developed by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin — is poised for its maiden flight.
The uncrewed launch vehicle, called New Glenn, will mark Blue Origin’s first attempt to send a rocket to orbit, a feat necessary if the company hopes to chip away at SpaceX’s long-held dominance in the industry.
New Glenn is set to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as early as next week.
The rocket, which stands about as tall as a 30-story building, consists of several parts: The first-stage rocket booster gives the initial thrust at liftoff. Atop the booster is an upper rocket stage that includes a cargo bay protected by a nose cone that will house experimental technology for this mission.
And, in an attempt to replicate the success that SpaceX has found reusing rocket boosters over the past decade, Blue Origin will also aim to guide New Glenn’s first-stage rocket booster back to a safe landing on a seafaring platform — named Jacklyn for Bezos’ mother — minutes after takeoff.
Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will seek to recover, refurbish and reuse first-stage rocket boosters to drive down costs.
For this inaugural mission, a smooth flight is not guaranteed.
But the eventual success of New Glenn, named after storied NASA astronaut John Glenn, is instrumental to some of Blue Origin’s most ambitious goals.
The rocket could one day power national security launches, haul Amazon internet satellites to space and even help in the construction of a space station that Blue Origin is developing with commercial partners.
New Glenn’s first flight
Blue Origin formally announced the development of New Glenn — which aims to outpower SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets and haul spacecraft up to 45 metric tons (99,200 pounds) to orbit — in 2016.
The vehicle is long overdue, as the company previously targeted 2020 for its first launch.
Delays, however, are common in the aerospace industry. And the debut flight of a new vehicle is almost always significantly behind schedule.
Rocket companies also typically take a conservative approach to the first liftoff, launching dummy payloads such as hunks of metal or, as was the case with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy debut in 2018, an old cherry red sports car.
Blue Origin has also branded itself as a company that aims to take a slow, diligent approach to rocket development that doesn’t “cut any corners,” according to Bezos, who founded Blue Origin and funds the company.
The company’s mascot is a tortoise, paying homage to “The Tortoise and the Hare” fable that made the “slow and steady wins the race” mantra a childhood staple.
“We believe slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Bezos said in 2016. Those comments could be seen as an attempt to position Blue Origin as the anti-SpaceX, which is known to embrace speed and trial-and-error over slow, meticulous development processes.
But SpaceX has certainly won the race to orbit. The company’s first orbital rocket, the Falcon 1, made a successful launch in September 2008. The company has deployed hundreds of missions to orbit since then.
And while SpaceX routinely destroys rockets during test flights as it begins developing a new rocket, the company has a solid track record for operational missions. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, for example, has experienced two in-flight failures and one launchpad explosion but no catastrophic events during human missions.
So far, Blue Origin has been known mostly for its space tourism efforts, launching paying customers and celebrities on New Shepard — a much smaller, suborbital rocket that is not powerful enough to send satellites to space.
Of the more than 20 flights New Shepard has conducted so far, the vehicle has experienced one failure during an uncrewed science mission.
While SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and Bezos have been known to spar and bluster publicly about their rocket companies, Musk’s input on New Glenn’s debut so far has been positive: “Godspeed!” he posted on his social media platform X on December 27.
What New Glenn will do
In some ways, New Glenn has already made its mark on the launch industry. Blue Origin has for years pitched the rocket to compete with both SpaceX and United Launch Alliance — a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that buys engines from Blue Origin — for lucrative military launch contracts.
The US Space Force selected Blue Origin, ULA and SpaceX in June to compete for $5.6 billion worth of Pentagon contracts for national security missions slated to launch over the next four years.
Blue Origin also has deals with several commercial companies to launch satellites. The contracts include plans to help deploy Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellites and a recently inked deal with AST SpaceMobile to help launch the Midland, Texas-based company’s space-based cellular broadband network.
New Glenn could also be instrumental in building Blue Origin’s planned space station, called Orbital Reef. Blue Origin and it commercial partners, including Sierra Space and Boeing, among others, hope the station will one day provide a new destination for astronauts as the International Space Station is phased out of service.
New Glenn vs. other powerful rockets
New Glenn packs significant power. Dubbed a “heavy-lift” vehicle, its capabilities lie between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and the more powerful Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.
SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, for example, can haul up to 22.8 metric tons (50,265 pounds) to space. While New Glenn is capable of carrying about double that mass, it may also be roughly the same price as a Falcon 9: reportedly around $60 million to $70 million per launch.
“I think in order to compete with Falcon 9, you have to go head-to-head or better on price,” said Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space, which provides data and analysis about the space sector.
The question, however, is whether Blue Origin will be able to sustain a competitive price point, Henry added.
Still, one feature that makes New Glenn stand out is its large payload fairing, or nose cone. The component protects the cargo bay and is a whopping 23 feet (7 meters) wide — nearly 6 feet (2 meters) larger than that of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy.
Henry said Blue Origin likely opted to outfit New Glenn with such a large fairing in order to help fulfill Bezos’ vision of the future.
The tech billionaire has long described a desire to one day move manufacturing and other polluting, “heavy” industries off Earth, leaving our home planet as a sort of national park for humans to visit and enjoy. And to do that, he would need rockets that can carry huge objects.
Though New Glenn outpowers the Falcon 9, SpaceX is in the process of developing the groundbreaking flagship of its rocket arsenal.
Like Bezos, SpaceX’s Musk has his own concept of our future in space, with humans living and working on other planets, particularly Mars. To help realize that vision, SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed. The nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket dwarfs New Glenn in every sense: Musk has said he hopes Starship will haul up to 300 tons to orbit.
SpaceX has billed Starship as a rocket that could make all others obsolete because it aims to drastically reduce the price per kilogram of getting cargo (or people) to space. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, Henry noted.
“But I think that if SpaceX continues to lower the cost of access to space, they’ll always be the No. 1 competitor,” Henry said.
What’s on board this flight
Blue Origin had planned to launch a pair of Mars-bound satellites on behalf of NASA for the first flight of New Glenn.
But delays with the rocket’s development prompted the space agency to change course, moving that flight to this spring at the earliest. So for this inaugural flight, Blue Origin opted to instead fly a “demonstrator” that will test technology needed for the company’s proposed Blue Ring spacecraft — which will aim to serve as a sort of in-space rideshare vehicle, dragging satellites deeper into space when needed.
The demonstrator on this New Glenn flight will remain aboard the rocket for the entire six-hour flight, Blue Origin said, and it will validate “communications capabilities from orbit to ground” as well as “test its in-space telemetry, tracking and command hardware, and ground-based radiometric tracking.”
The Blue Ring Pathfinder demonstrator is part of a deal Blue Origin inked with the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Why Blue Origin wants to reuse rockets
Similar to SpaceX, Blue Origin is aiming to recover and refly its first-stage rocket boosters in a bid to make launches less expensive.
“Reusability is integral to radically reducing cost-per-launch,” the company said in a recent news release, using the same oft-repeated sentiment that SpaceX has touted since it began landing rocket boosters in 2015.
Bezos, however, has acknowledged the importance of reusing rocket parts since he founded the company in 2000 — two years before Musk established SpaceX. And the company has already developed its suborbital New Shepard tourism rocket to be reusable.
“It’s not a copy cat game,” Henry said. “Blue Origin has been pursuing reusable vehicles since before reusable vehicles were cool. Now it’s much more of a mainstream idea (because of SpaceX). The difference is that it’s taken Blue Origin so much longer to get to orbit.”
If successful, returning the New Glenn rocket booster for a safe landing will be a stunning feat. After expending most of its fuel to propel the rocket’s upper stage to space, the first-stage booster will need to make a clean separation. The booster must then maneuver with pinpoint guidance and reignite its engines with precision timing to avoid crashing into the ocean or the Jacklyn recovery platform.
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