A few minutes after 2:00 a.m., a giant 320-foot-tall rocket slipped its tethers at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and rose into the sky in a bluish-white column of flame, turning night into day. The east coast of Florida’s Space Coast. About 8 minutes later, the rocket’s large first-stage booster failed to stick its landing on an Atlantic barge, not exactly the desired result, but not unusual for the first attempt to land a booster upright.
Starting early in the morning, A mission called NG-1It marks Blue Origin’s inaugural flight The new Glenn rocket—and billionaire Jeff Bezos created the company’s first orbital launch. With a successful maiden flight, New Glenn will become the newest, heavy-duty, reusable rocket in the aerospace industry’s arsenal, a tool that will increase launch capabilities, shake up the launch market, and catalyze great science with its power and vastness. the nose cone that protects a spacecraft’s payload during launch.
“This rocket, with its focus on reusability and an oversized fairing, is a unique new addition that I think people are really looking forward to,” he says. Lori GarverFormer NASA Deputy Administrator.
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During his time at the space agency, Garver encouraged companies like Elon Musk to invest in commercial launch services. SpaceXwhich currently carries most of our space cargo into low Earth orbit and beyond. But competition is healthy. It lowers prices while encouraging innovation and improvement. Rockets are no exception. And now, as questions loom over Musk’s role (and goals) in the Trump administration, New Glenn is considering entering the launch market. “With SpaceX and (Musk’s) reputation, there’s a lot of interest in a competitor coming in. And I think that’s why more attention will be paid to this rocket,” says Garver. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about having all our eggs in one basket.”
“Reusability is the future of startup”
Today SpaceX is arguably the main supplier of launchers to NASA and the US military; his fleet Falcon 9 rockets the company’s is also being sent Starlink communication satellites into orbit. But NASA is already counting on New Glenn, named after the late astronaut John Glenn, to put two spacecraft into orbit around Mars. And Blue Origin has other customers lined up, among others AST SpaceMobile, Telesat and Amazon, which will eventually launch an orbital mega-constellation (like Starlink) More than 3,200 communications satellites, known as Kuiper project.
“This is a big deal because we’re finding ourselves in this area where the demand for marketing hasn’t decreased; it’s actually increased tremendously,” he says. French Mike of the Space Policy Group.
Founded a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin predicts the future “Millions of people live and work in space for the benefit of Earth.” His pet is a turtle…the gesture To the slow and steady competitor who ultimately triumphs against a faster hare, which is now an obvious metaphor for SpaceX. nowmore than four years later than the planned launch, New Glenn has finally flown (although, for those keeping track, in 2015 Blue Origin became the company’s first to successfully launch and land the rocket with his New Shepard space vehicle).
This inaugural flight is designed to test a rich cache of hardware: the rocket’s payload-delivering upper stage, this time. Packed with a 45,000-pound load indicator Called Blue Ring Pathfinder, and a reusable first stage booster, called So you’re telling me there’s a chance. During the six-hour flight, Blue Origin crews will test Pathfinder’s flight, communications and operational systems, with a constant stream of information relayed between ground control and Earth orbit. After launch, the 230-foot-tall first-stage booster, powered by seven BE-4 engines delivering about 3.8 million pounds of thrust, attempted to land. Jacklyn, A barge in the Atlantic Ocean, named after Bezos’ mother. Of everything attempted this morning, nailing the landing was probably the most difficult.
“We know that landing a booster for the first time is ambitious, but you know what? That’s what we’re going for,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s vice president of space systems, in a webcast at the launch. “You could say we’re a little crazy to test it on the first flight, but the data we get to fly the full mission profile is incredibly valuable.”
The successful landing is the most crucial step towards achieving reusability similar to what SpaceX has already achieved with its rockets: Blue Origin has designed these boosters to fly at least 25 times.
“Reusability is the future of startup; in this way it is possible to lower the costs”, he says Clay MowryCEO of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and former CEO of Blue Origin.
“You don’t fly an airplane and throw it away after use,” he says. “I think (New Glenn) will be a very important event for the entire space industry. It brings a lot of capability to the heavy end of the market.”
Bigger Rockets, Bigger Science
When it comes to big rockets, we tend to focus a lot on lift, Mowry says, but power isn’t the only thing that sets New Glenn apart. “I think the most extraordinary thing about that vehicle is the volume it brings,” he says, referring to the payload fairing that encapsulates the cargo.
At seven meters (23 feet) wide, the New Glenn’s fairing is the widest on the market. It doubles the volume delivered by standard five-meter (16.4-foot) class rockets such as the Falcon Heavy, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and NASA’s now-retired Ariane 5 launch vehicle. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, 2021.
“I remember walking underneath (New Glenn’s cargo bay), and it was such a big space, and these engineers were there, like, ‘Oh my God, this thing is huge,'” Mowry says, recalling a company visit. production facility “I think it will have an impact on their ability — that is, satellite operators and customers — to deploy things they couldn’t dream of before.” For example, space telescopes.
When JWST was launched, it was folded like origami aboard Ariane 5, where it was packed as tightly as possible into a delicate telescope with a 21-meter (68.9-foot) spread sun shield. For many days, the groups from home played the instrument critical and complex implementation sequence 344 in a single point of failure. Using bigger rockets like New Glenn and SpaceX starshipcurrently under development, could mean future giant space telescopes don’t have to go to extremes to save space. Instead, the cavernous payload fairing “may spark another level of thinking about what might be possible from a space instrumentation standpoint,” says France, also a former NASA chief of staff. “As much as we get so much from space science, it will always be limited to launch: ‘What can we fit? How big is the box?'” says the French. “There is such ingenuity, really just advances, in terms of technology, that allow us to have these advances on the scientific side. Always it’s very impressive to meet and talk with the people who live at that intersection.”
NASA denied several requests American scientific to talk to some of the agency’s top experts about how large rockets could impact future science missions. But already the agency presentationsreference New Glenn (and Starship) in designs for flagship astrophysics Living World Observatoryspace telescope to look for signs of extraterrestrial life on warm Earth-sized exoplanets around dozens of sun-like stars. Likewise, NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, a pair of spacecraft that will orbit Mars, they had to fly Had New Glenn’s initial launch, in October 2024, gone as planned.
“From a scientific point of view, more launches are a good thing,” says the Frenchman. “More launches are likely to mean more competitive pricing, more choices about timing, and more choices about what those launches can do.”
Populating the skies
Science missions, of course, are not the only passengers on rockets of any size. The need for military payloads, national security assets, and commercial satellites in orbit far exceeds what space scientists—and their limited budgets—require for Earth observation or global communications.
“Access to space is critical to society today,” says Garver.
Indeed, the customer base for rockets like New Glenn will almost certainly be dominated by companies building mega-satellite constellations—such as Starlink, Project Kuiper, the UK’s OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat. And that’s for a simple reason: building these constellations requires launching a lot of satellites, and many more satellites can fit into the much larger payload space of such a rocket. This means fewer layoffs and lower startup costs.
“When you’re deploying a constellation of hundreds to thousands of satellites, that’s a huge cost in terms of having access to space, being able to put those satellites in space efficiently, in the right place,” says Mowry.
Also, such satellites are not designed for long life. So, as the French note, maintaining these constellations means constantly refreshing the hardware in orbit, which requires a high launch cadence. “If you think of the market as a pyramid, you have these big commercial constellations at the bottom, building demand,” he says. How many such constellations can be safely orbited remains an open question. But such a broad demand will create space for less conventional and smarter applications, for future projects not yet imagined.
