-
Here’s a gallery of still images from a launch video of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
Blue Origin -
Blue Origin will assemble the New Glenn rocket at a large facility the company is building at Kennedy Space Center.
Blue Origin -
Here, New Glenn is being lifted.
Blue Origin -
Aerodynamic strakes are shown wiggling.
Blue Origin -
New Glenn will take flight from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 36.
Blue Origin -
Smoke! Fire!
Blue Origin -
And here’s a view of the large Blue Origin assembly facility at the Cape. Oh, and a launch.
Blue Origin -
Stage separation!
Blue Origin -
The first stage falls back to Earth.
Blue Origin -
A single engine burns to slow its descent.
Blue Origin -
It’s another company with another barge.
Blue Origin -
There are six landing legs. The vehicle can tolerate the failure of one and still land.
Blue Origin
After months of speculation, Blue Origin finally released more details about its New Glenn rocket on Tuesday. The 82-meter-tall rocket will have the capacity to lift 45 tons to low Earth orbit and an impressive 13 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. The two-stage rocket should be ready for its maiden flight by the end of 2019, company founder Jeff Bezos said.
New Glenn, named for the first US astronaut to orbit Earth, John Glenn, will also have a fully reusable first stage. In addition to remarks by Bezos at the Satellite 2017 conference in Washington, Blue Origin released a video showing the rocket’s return to Earth. It will employ aerodynamic strakes for maneuvering during the return and will land on a barge. It is designed for up to 100 reuses. The rocket’s return looks similar to that of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but New Glenn is a larger and considerably more powerful booster.
Were it flying today, New Glenn would in fact be the most powerful rocket on Earth. However, other large boosters are also under development that will likely fly first. SpaceX is building the Falcon Heavy, which will have the capacity to deliver 53 tons to low Earth orbit, and NASA is developing the Space Launch System with a 70-ton capacity.
Today’s announcement, therefore, marks the beginning of a golden era of heavy-lift booster development. During the next few years, these three rockets will be competing on performance, price, and reliability. In addition to large satellite launches, they will also potentially enable NASA’s deep-space exploration plans—including lunar exploration—and potentially missions to Mars. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX anticipate much lower operating costs than the government rocket, and both will be pursuing reusability. But as ever in the rocket business, it’s one thing to show a video rendering a future launch. It’s another thing to reach the launch pad, fly, and reuse.
During his talk on Tuesday, Bezos expressed confidence in the prospects for New Glenn, saying the company has learned important lessons from the development of its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft, which has already demonstrated low-cost reusability and could begin suborbital tourism flights as early as next year. “This is what is making it possible for us to build an orbital vehicle,” he said. “The orbital vehicle is 100 percent informed by all of the lessons that we learned in the course of the New Shepard program, so it’s very directly relevant.”
The two- and three-stage variants of New Glenn will be larger than any rocket in existence.
Blue Origin
Some critics have dinged Blue Origin for its initial focus on space tourism, saying the company isn’t really serious about space exploration. But such criticism is misguided, Bezos said, noting that in the past, entertainment has been a driver for important innovation. “There are historical cases where entertainment turns out to be a driver of technologies that then become very practical and utilitarian for other things,” he said, citing the early use of aviation for barnstorming, and GPUs originally developed for PC gaming now employed in machine learning.
Whatever one thinks of New Shepard and its brief suborbital hops, however, there can be little question that New Glenn is a serious rocket. The booster already has a customer, too—Eutelsat has contracted with Blue Origin for a geostationary satellite launch. Moreover, New Glenn is also, as Bezos repeated Tuesday, “the smallest orbital rocket Blue Origin will ever build.” In the future, even larger boosters are coming, such as the previously teased New Armstrong rocket. The tech mogul has recently said that lunar exploration is the next logical step for human activity in space.
Listing image by Blue Origin
from Ars Technica http://ift.tt/2mxhExQ
via IFTTT