Jeff Bezos' big rocket comes into view and gets closer to launch
There's an easy knock against the space dreams of Jeff Bezos and his rocket company Blue Origin: In its 24th year of existence, the company has yet to put a single thing into orbit.
Blue Origin's achievements so far are modest: a small vehicle known as New Shepard that takes space tourists and experiments on short suborbital jaunts. In contrast, SpaceX, the rocket company founded by another high-profile aerospace billionaire Elon Musk, dominates the launch market today.
On Wednesday, Blue Origin hopes to change the narrative by hosting a coming-out party of sorts for its new big rocket.
In the morning, the doors of a gigantic garage opened at Launch Complex 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, as tall as a 32-story building, lay horizontally on the trusses of a mobile launch pad.
The device rested on a transport mechanism that resembled a number of long mechanical centipedes, but with wheels, 288 in total, instead of feet. It began rolling slowly up a concrete ramp, a quarter-mile ride toward the launch pad.
The rocket will undergo at least a week of testing before returning to the garage.
“I'm very confident there will be a launch this year,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in an interview. “We are going to show a lot of progress this year. I think people will see how quickly we can move.”
The powerful rocket, named New Glenn in honor of John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth in 1962, will be capable of towing about 100,000 pounds into low Earth orbit. That's a greater lift capacity than SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, but not as much as the Falcon Heavy.
New Glenn is one of several rockets expected to debut this year, increasing competition for SpaceX. In January, the Vulcan rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, made a successful maiden flight. Two BE-4 engines from Blue Origin were used, proving that their design lived up to expectations. New Glenn's first stage will use seven BE-4s.
Later this year, the Ariane 6, a rocket designed by the European Space Agency, is expected to make its maiden flight, and SpaceX continues to work on its giant Starship rocket that will carry NASA astronauts to the moon's surface.
Carissa Christensen, the CEO of BryceTech, a space consultancy in Alexandria, Virginia, said the wealth of Mr. Bezos, Amazon's founder, gave Blue Origin credibility from the start.
“You've heard that saying,” she said. “Rockets run on money. And so the depth of resources available to that company and the dedication of the founder, I think, makes it unique.”
But the luxury of billions of dollars may have meant that Blue Origin didn't always move with much urgency, she said. “Maybe that shifts you to a bit of a perfectionist model,” Ms. Christensen said.
Preparations for the first launch of the New Glenn
The rocket now on the Blue Origin launch pad is not quite what will be launched later this year.
The booster's tanks are intended for space, but the rest of the booster may or may not be used for launch. In addition, the BE-4 engines have not yet been installed. The second stage and the nose cone are only test versions.
In the coming days, Blue Origin will practice filling the rocket's fuel tanks.
A few miles away, a rocket factory is producing parts for future New Glenn rockets.
In 2015, Mr. Bezos announced plans for Blue Origin to build and launch rockets in Florida, with the first launch taking place in 2020. Within a few years, a massive Blue Origin factory sprang up on empty land not far outside NASA's Kennedy Space Center. , but what happened inside remained a mystery to outsiders.
Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president overseeing New Glenn's development, said the factory was vacant when he joined Blue Origin in 2019.
“We went from a building with tape on the floor to everything you see today,” he said during a tour of the factory in late January.
The spacious factory, which covers an area of 60,000 square meters, is full, but not crammed, with partially built rockets. Parts of the rocket enter one side of the factory and are collected at stations that stretch across the factory floor, which is four football fields long.
Towering in the middle of the factory was an upper section of a New Glenn booster, with huge fins at the top. “They're about 15 feet long and about 8 feet deep,” said Jordan Charles, the vice president in charge of the booster. “They raise very little. They go down a lot. They help guide the vehicle.”
New Glenn's boosters will land on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean and then relaunch for at least 25 flights. That's similar to how SpaceX lands and reuses its Falcon 9 boosters.
Unlike SpaceX, which took a step-by-step fail-until-you-fail approach, Blue Origin is hoping everything will work on the first try and that its engineers already know enough about landing New Shepard's much smaller boosters .
“The software, the guidance, it's all very similar to what we did on New Shepard and it gives us a lot of confidence,” Mr. Charles said.
Walking through a door takes you into another cavernous room, this one intended for the manufacture of the rocket's nose cones or fairings, which protect the payload during ascent through the atmosphere. At 6.5 meters in diameter, the new Glenn is wider than most other rockets, and its fairing is twice as voluminous as those of thinner competitors, Blue Origin says.
After completion of the launch pad tests, the rocket is rolled back to the garage and the stages are taken apart.
From there, Blue Origin will begin assembling the final version of New Glenn for the initial launch, installing the engines and testing them.
No launch date has been announced. Blue Origin has not yet confirmed the first payload, but it could be two small identical NASA spacecraft for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or EscaPADE, mission, which will study the magnetic fields around Mars.
Mr Jones said he expected two New Glenn launches this year and hoped to accelerate the launches next year, to as many as one per month. Even getting close to that pace would be impressive.
SpaceX has taken years to achieve its lightning-fast launch rate, which now averages twice a week. The first Falcon 9 rocket took off in 2010. It wasn't until 2017 that the number of Falcon 9 launches reached double digits.
“We will have the equipment, tooling capabilities and launch system to immediately conduct 12 launches per year,” Mr Jones said. Ultimately, the goal is 24 per year or more, he said.
From Kindles to space stations
Mr Limp is not so sure a second New Glenn launch will get off the ground this year. “It's hard to see around that corner because you're going to learn so much from the first launch,” he said. “I would just say: I will be very happy if we get at least one launch this year.”
He became CEO of Blue Origin in December and, at first glance, seemed like an odd choice to lead a rocket company. He had worked at Amazon and headed its consumer electronics division, which includes Echo smart speakers, Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets.
As part of that job, he had some space experience leading Amazon's Project Kuiper, which plans to launch a constellation of Internet satellites to rival SpaceX's Starlink service.
About a year ago he decided, “I still wanted to do something new, but I just didn't want to be in consumer electronics.” Mr. Bezos suggested he might replace Bob Smith, who had decided to retire as head of Blue Origin.
“My first reaction was, I don't know much about rockets, maybe not,” Mr. Limp recalled.
But within a few months, Mr. Bezos convinced him “that he didn't think Blue needed another rocket scientist,” Mr. Limp said. 'We have buildings full of them. But what was needed was some leadership on the scale that Blue had become.”
He said his experience in consumer electronics — taking conceptual ideas, creating prototypes, turning them into finished products and then manufacturing millions of them — could help. Blue Origin is not going to build millions of rockets, but it will have to build more faster.
Mr Limp also wants Blue Origin to make decisions faster. “Maybe what we were doing was looking for perfection in many things,” he said.
If you take a little more risk, “you'll move much, much faster,” he said.
Mr. Limp sees a future with many new business opportunities beyond Earth. “My view is that the demand for orbital launch vehicles will be much greater than people predict in five years,” he said. “It won't be: Blue Origin wins, SpaceX loses, or the other way around. There will be several winners.”
Other Blue Origin projects include a lunar lander for NASA and the Orbital Reef space station. “They are building fundamental capabilities for the longer term vision,” he said. “So there is a method to what we do.”