What's the deal with Blue Origin and their long promised but still totally unseen mega
rocket, the New Glen. In theory, Blue Origin should be right up
there with SpaceX leading the next generation of space exploration. They were both founded
at more or less the same time, with more or less the same goal
by two men who would go on to become more or less equally rich and
successful. Blue Origin and Bezos love to talk a big game, they just
never have much to show for it. But this all changes in twenty twenty
four with the debut of their first orbital rocket, or does it? This
is the space race. The New Glen is a project that has been under
development at Blue Origin since around twenty twelve. The design of the rocket was
finally revealed at a presentation by Jeff Bezos in twenty sixteen, which showed off
a gigantic new rocket design with a fully reusable booster core. At the time,
there was nothing like New Glen. Bezos actually managed to get his announcement
in about two weeks before Elon Musk debuted the Interplanetary Transport System concept that would
eventually go on to become Starship. Fundamentally, though, New Glen is an
entirely different vehicle than its or starship. New Glen offers the same futuristic appearance,
but its functionality is more grounded in traditional rocketry, basically doing the same
job as a Falcon nine, just with more size and more power. At
the heart of this booster are seven of the new B E four engines that
make a combined three point eight five million pounds of thrust burning liquid methane and
liquid oxygen fuel. Blue Origin says that's good for up to forty five metric
tons of capacity to low Earth orbit. Compared to the methane burning SpaceX Raptor
two that powers the starship, the B E four offers a little bit more
thrust two hundred and fifty metric tons versus two hundred and thirty, but it's
also a significantly bigger engine than the Raptor. Blue Origin likes to call the
B four a medium performance version of a high performance architecture, and what they
mean by that is the engine is overbuilt for the purpose that it's being used
for. They're never going to push the system to its limit the way that
SpaceX does with their Raptor. The B four operates at a much lower chamber
pressure, and that should result in a more consistent and reliable engine. Considering
that eight out of thirty three raptors failed on the first launch of the Starship,
Blue Origin might have the right idea here. It's not the power that
makes New Glen special, though, it's the size. While a Falcon Heavy
might still offer over one million pounds more thrust, the New Glen has a
forty percent wider cargo firing at seven meters in diameter plus around double the length
of a standard Falcon nose cone. SpaceX has talked about making an extended length
fairing for the Falcon Heavy, but we have yet to see it done.
So New Glen is much closer to Starship in terms of size and cargo volume,
although with nowhere near the power. Blue Origins claim of forty five metric
tons to low Earth orbit is a bit questionable considering the size of the rocket
and the thrust that it has available, plus the need to reserve fuel for
the landing burn. It would be a lot more plausible to say forty five
tons in an expendable mode where the booster is sacrificed and the BEE four engines
are run closer to their actual limit. Either way, it's looking like the
niche that New Glen is going after here is customers who want to put very
large objects into relatively low altitude orbits. But aside from deploying the core modules
of Blue Origins own Orbital Reef space station, it's unclear how much of a
market there really is for this kind of a service. It's actually a bit
hard to imagine just what Blue Origin was thinking when they designed New Glen,
Like why is it so big? What's the purpose for making the rockets so
wide? Other than just looking really cool. We know why Starship is so
gigantic, and there are several good reasons for it. Because it has to
move a large crew of people from Earth to Mars, and people need space
to live. Because it has to be able to carry one hundred metric tons
of stuff all the way to the surface of Mars. Because it has to
be able to land on Mars, then lift off, and then re enter
Earth's atmosphere and then land again. That all demands a big ass rocket.
And for the original its design, Elon had wanted a twelve meter diameter ship,
so he had to compromise at nine meters diameter for the final Starship plus
SpaceX already has their own use case for the low Earth orbit capability of Starship.
They need it to deploy the final constellation of ten thousand Starlink V two
satellites, and obviously NASA considers that capability useful enough to choose Starship as their
new crude landing vehicle for the Moon. So as ridiculous as Starship, maybe
there are legitimate reasons for it to exist. Even in the promotional animation for
New Glen, Blue Origin just shows it deploy one single generic looking satellite thing,
which at scale would be the biggest satellite ever launched, and it's hard
to believe that something like this is really necessary in a world where technology is
constantly shrinking in size. Though, even with all of that said, in
April twenty twenty three, it was announced the New Glen is going to Mars,
or at least it's going to be used to send too much smaller spaceships
on their way to Mars. These two crafts are called the Escape and Plasma
Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers or ESCAPADE, and they're based on Rocket Labs Photon kickstage
that is typically used on top of the Electron rocket, which is tiny,
so each vehicle is only about five hundred and fifty kilograms in weight and with
dimensions of seventy centimeters wide by ninety centimeters long, So it's like if you
and a friend called an uber and an empty school bus showed up to drive
you. Even the people in charge of Escapade have literally said that the New
Glen is quote massively oversized for this particular mission, but they didn't have much
choice in the assignment. New Glen and Escapade were paired up under a NASA
program called the Venture Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare or VADER, and the
idea is that NASA helps to connect low stakes missions with new and unproven launch
vehicles. Basically, Escapade isn't a critical Mars mission. It's not carrying a
new rover or a multibillion dollar instrument, so it doesn't really matter if the
mission gets delayed or even if it fails to reach Mars at all. Not
the end of the world, and therefore it's a perfect opportunity to test out
New Glen and just see what it does. The most interesting thing here is
that Escapade is scheduled to launch in the second half of twenty twenty four,
probably around September to October, and because this is a mission to Mars,
they only have a limited window of time when the two planets are at their
closest distance. If they miss that window, then the mission has to wait
at two years before they have another opportunity. The timeline here is fascinating because
as far as we know, the New Glen only exists in computer renderings.
We've seen the B four engine, and we've seen a full scale model of
the first stage booster, but we have yet to see a functional New Glenn
prototype perform any kind of live testing. And maybe we're just spoiled by SpaceX
and the way that they've been developing the Starship out in the open for everyone
to see. That's definitely not usual for a new rocket, But you would
think that seven years into development and about one year out from this mission to
Mars, that New Glenn would have at least given us a sign of life.
Considering that SpaceX has totally revised the design of Starship like four times between
the its presentation in twenty sixteen and the BFR in twenty eighteen, they were
still able to begin flight testing the little Starhopper prototype in twenty twenty, and
by the spring of twenty twenty one they had managed to fly an upper stage
prototype to an altitude of ten kilometers and even landed successfully on the ground.
And then it was another two years after that to get a full scale rocket
in the air for an orbital test flight. The best indication that we have
on the progress of New Glen comes from this Escapade mission announcement we heard from
Arianne Cornell, the vice president of Commercial Orbital astronaut and International Sales at Blue
Origin. She told the media quote, it will be an early New Glen
mission and we are going to be ready. But you should never take a
salesperson's word for anything. So we can also turn to the principal investigator for
Escapade, Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley Space Science Laboratory.
He said about New Glen, quote, it hasn't launched yet and we are
concerned about that. But having seen the Blue Origin facility at Cape Canaveral,
I was much less concerned after seeing all the work they've done, I'm confident
they will likely be ready for the launch of Escapade. So this guy has
had an opportunity to see something that the rest of us haven't, and he
seems to have been impressed with what he saw. Though I want to go
back to that quote and repeat this one line. I'm confident they will likely
be ready for the launch of Escapade. He chose to insert that word likely
into his comments, so I don't think the man is fully convinced. Aside
from what progress may or may not have been made in the vehicle itself,
we are also watching the development of the Bee four engine very carefully, and
this seems to be the one area where Blue Origin has excelled. The company
was very fortunate to sell United Launch Alliance on using the Bee four to power
the core stage of their new Vulcan cent Or rocket, which is a design
that is significantly more mature than New Glen. So in theory, the ULA
Vulcan should be flight testing the Bee four well in advance of New Glen,
and that is incredibly useful information for Blue Origin to have. Unfortunately for them,
the Vulcan, which was supposed to launch for the first time this summer,
has been unexpectedly delayed by a flaw in the design of the Centaur upper
stage. It actually exploded on a test stand a few months ago, but
we didn't know the cause. That's now been revealed as a structural weakness in
the ultra thin steel skin of the outer shell, So the rocket actually has
to be redesigned with a reinforced structure, and then a new test candidate has
to be constructed again. This is the upper stage, so the problem has
nothing to do with Blue Origin. The B four engines have so far performed
perfectly, and the booster had a successful static fire test that confirmed it is
ready for launch. But now they have to wait for the upper stage to
be rebuilt and retested before we can even consider another launch attempt. So at
this point we might not see a flight test for the Bee four in twenty
twenty three. That means Blue Origin just has to continue on with new Glen
and hope for the best. So back when Blue Origin was just starting out,
they had this mission statement grid datum ferositare, which means step by step
ferociously. It's kind of like a tortoise and the hair thing. They even
started painting turtles onto the side of their new Shepherd rocket after every flight.
It's a pretty respectable strategy and it comes as a pretty stark contrast to the
move fast and break stuff methodology over at SpaceX. The Blue Origin roadmap was
to first perfect the art of suborbital rocketry with the New Shepherd, then leverage
that accomplishment into the orbital New Glen, and then leverage that into an even
more capable New Armstrong Moon rocket. But looking at their track record, it's
starting to feel like Blue Origin has lost its way. They'd never really developed
New Shepherd to the maturity and launch cadence that it was intended for. They
flew a handful of crude launches, then had one catastrophic failure, and haven't
really touched the rocket since. Now they're still trying to push New Glen into
service without any proper testing or any real reason for their rocket to even exist.
They want to build a space they want to land on the Moon.
They went from taking it step by step to trying to leap frog the entire
competition and jump to the head of the pack without even reaching orbit. I
can't stress that enough. Blue Origin has yet to put even one of their
products into outer space, but they want to lead the space race now.
To be perfectly clear, I haven't put anything in a space either, and
I never will, so I'm not meaning to criticize, more like just pointing
out the obvious here, but it is a really interesting story to talk about,
and we are genuinely fascinated to see what happens with the new Glen over
the year to come.