Recently, the company shared a photo of the heavy launch vehicle at its facility in Florida, where the first and second stages of the New Glenn are connected together for the first time. Connecting the two rocket stages has been a long time coming, but Blue Origin has finally made serious progress on the New Glenn launch vehicle.
The New Glenn is scheduled to make its debut flight in November from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, although the exact date has not yet been determined. For its maiden mission, New Glenn will carry Blue Origin’s Blue Ring technology, an orbital platform designed to support spacecraft operations, as its primary payload. The Blue Ring launch will be part of the DarkSky-1 (DS-1) mission, sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Agency.
The rocket was originally planned to launch a pair of probes for NASA‘s Acceleration and Plasma Dynamics Explorer (EscaPADE) in October, but the space agency decided to stop pre-launch preparations for the mission about a month before launch due to concerns that the rocket’s debut flight would be delayed.
Blue Origin has been developing the New Glenn rocket for more than a decade, and its first launch was originally scheduled for 2020. Over the years, the heavy-lift launch vehicle has experienced several delays, mostly related to the development of its engines. The new Glenn is based on seven BE-4 engines developed by Blue Origin, which required extensive testing and refinement.
Earlier this year, the rocket demonstrated a certain suitability for launch after passing a series of tests, and Blue Origin was awarded the NASA EscaPADE contract for the first flight of its rocket. As the mission’s launch date approaches, NASA has scrapped the New Glenn debut flight and the rocket will deliver Blue Ring instead.
With a height of about 320 feet (98 meters), the New Glenn is capable of lifting 45 tons to low Earth orbit and 13 tons to geostationary orbit. The rocket has a reusable first stage designed for 25 missions.
Now that the New Glenn is assembled, the next step will be a static hot-fire test of the entire vehicle, during which all of its engines are ignited for several seconds. Earlier in September, Blue Origin conducted a test of the rocket’s second stage that lasted 15 seconds. “The purpose of the test was to verify the interaction between the second stage subsystems, the two BE-3U engines and the ground control systems,” Blue Origin said in a statement.
Blue Origin is relying on its New Shepard rocket to launch paying customers into suborbital space while awaiting the long-awaited debut of the New Glenn. The rocket will be a welcome addition to the elite club of heavy launch vehicles that make regular flights into space.
