Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket rises on launch pad ahead of debut liftoff (photo)

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The flight is targeted for August, pending the success of tests this year.

a rocket on the launch pad in darkness
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the pad at Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Feb. 21, 2024. (Image credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin's powerful new rocket has gone vertical on the launch pad for testing, ahead of a possible debut flight later this year.

The New Glenn rocket from Blue Origin rolled out on to Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Wednesday (Feb. 21), the company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos announced.

The heavy-lift rocket will be put through its paces in the coming weeks and months with "several demonstrations of cryogenic fluid loading, pressure control and the vehicle’s venting systems," Blue Origin officials wrote in a statement. 

Related: Facts about Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company

New Glenn is about 322 feet (98 meters) tall and can send roughly 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. It will be Blue Origin's first orbital rocket. The company currently flies people and payloads to suborbital space with a smaller vehicle called New Shepard.

New Glenn's lifting capacity will be twice that of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, and, like the Falcon 9, its first stage will be reusable. That booster will feature seven of Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, which continue to undergo hot-fire tests at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and at a Blue Origin site in west Texas.

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The BE-4 was already tested during a spaceflight in January — the first flight of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket, which sent Astrobotic's Peregrine moon lander to space. While the launch went well, a fuel leak aboard Peregrine caused the lander to come crashing back to Earth 10 days after liftoff.

New Glenn's development has been going on for more than a decade, and its first targeted launch date of 2020 has been delayed several times. The rocket's debut effort will aim to launch NASA's two-spacecraft EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars mission no earlier than August.

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Elizabeth Howell
Elizabeth Howell
Former Staff Writer, Spaceflight (July 2022-November 2024)

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., was a staff writer in the spaceflight channel between 2022 and 2024 specializing in Canadian space news. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years from 2012 to 2024. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House, leading world coverage about a lost-and-found space tomato on the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022) is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. 

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Unclear Engineer
    I seems odd to me that the first flight of this new rocket will carry a NASA payload. ("The rocket's debut effort will aim to launch NASA's two-spacecraft EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars mission no earlier than August.')

    Is the payload that cheap, or is there unusually high confidence that "New Glenn" will succeed on its first flight attempt?
    Reply
  • Ryan F. Mercer
    Unclear Engineer said:
    Is the payload that cheap, or is there unusually high confidence that "New Glenn" will succeed on its first flight attempt?
    This isn't an Elon Musk rocket. It isn't designed to fail.
    Reply
  • Torbjorn Larsson
    If they continue their launcher crawl at this pace, they will catch up with Falcon 9 about the time it will be retired by SpaceX next generation Starship.

    But it is for the best, the market should have some fallback options until there is real competition again.

    Unclear Engineer said:
    I seems odd to me that the first flight of this new rocket will carry a NASA payload.
    No odder than that SLS launched an Orion spacecraft and ten CubeSats on its first flight, all NASA payloads, or that the first H3 flight (unfortunately) tried to launch an expensive satellite.

    The payload project is ambitious but on the cheap:
    The company has not announced a firm schedule for the debut of New Glenn other than sometime later this year. The first New Glenn test flight will likely carry a pair of small NASA satellites bound for Mars, an agency official said in November.

    This NASA mission, called ESCAPADE, is on contract with Blue Origin for a launch date in August 2024. However, this schedule is under review. New Glenn's massive lift capability is overkill for the two ESCAPADE spacecraft, each about the size of a mini-fridge, so engineers are studying the possibility of using New Glenn to send the missions directly to Mars rather than launching them into an initial orbit around Earth.

    Changing the trajectory for ESCAPADE would allow for a launch date later this year. The mission must launch in 2024, with Earth and Mars in the right positions in the Solar System, or else wait until 2026.
    https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/big-year-ahead-says-jeff-bezos-as-new-glenn-rocket-rolls-to-launch-pad/
    Ryan F. Mercer said:
    It isn't designed to fail.
    Which makes it no different from any other design project.

    (Unless you count such things as the New Glenn upper stage reentry destruction as a fail, say. There are "deliver and fail" vehicles such as medical pills designed to dissolve to release payload.)

    I think you may be confusing two different project tactics?

    The typical design at cost so is slow perfectionist and design for mass production so is fast iterative. The latter will need heavy investment in short order but will hopefully recuperate the investment over time.

    As the space industry is transiting to airplane type land-and-refuel hardware it should adopt successful airplane industry mass production. (Boeing 737 10,000+ planes produced, say.) BO doesn't.
    Reply
  • sciencecompliance
    I'm going to go on the record to say that Blue Origin's naming convention for their rockets is stupid.
    Reply