The Orbital Reef space station is one of the most exciting concepts we've seen in
the modern day space race. It is a fantastic vision of the future where
people are living and working in a gigantic and technologically advanced orbital platform hundreds of
miles above the Earth. This is what the twenty first century is supposed to
look like. But two years on from the project announcement and reality is setting
in for Blue Origin and their ambitions for space station construction. Now we are
left to ask, was the dream of orbital Reef too good to be true?
This is the space race. The thing about Orbital Reef is that it
is the best space station design we have ever seen, and by that I
mean we obviously have to disregard any speculative fiction ideas like O'Neal cylinders and von
Braun's rotating ring station and just focus on practical proposals for space stations that actually
could be built with existing means. NASA was confident enough in Blue Origins concept
that they granted the company one hundred and thirty million dollars to develop Orbital Reef,
with the expectation that it could be up and running as early as twenty
twenty seven, which would dovetail beautifully with the final decommissioning of the ISS.
In theory it was all worked out, Blue would partner with more established aerospace
companies like Sierra Space and Boeing to round out the hardware and transportation needs for
the station. Their sister company Amazon would handle the logistics and supply chain management.
Amazon Web Services would provide all of the computing power and connectivity that the
project could possibly require. The backbone of the orbital REEF would be a trio
of gigantic core modules, each one over six meters in diameter and around twelve
meters in length, plus a docking Note there is no rocket currently in service
that could handle a payload anywhere near that size. Only Blue origins soon to
come New Glen would be able to do the job. The also soon to
come dream Chaser space plane from Sierra Space would handle crew, transport and supply
alongside the kind of working but still not really Boeing Starline or capsule. The
inflatable life modules from Sierra would allow the team to very quickly grow the internal
pressurized volume of the station to eight hundred and thirty cubic meters establishing what Blue
referred to as a mixed use business park in space where anyone could visit either
as a tourist, a researcher or a business trying to leverage the microgravity environment.
And just like all projects in their conceptual phase, it sounded fantastic in
theory. Right now, we are exactly two years from the orbital ref announcement
and one third of the way through the project timeline to get Phase one operational,
and Blue Origin have virtually nothing to show for it. In fact,
the latest report that we've seen from CNBC claims that the partnership between Blue and
Sierra Space has already started to fall apart. So what's going on here?
Well, According to three anonymous sources who spoke to CNBC, the companies are
looking at a potential end to the Orbital Reef project due to a general lack
of progress on the station's design and construction, in addition to a restructuring of
priorities at Blue Origin. In hindsight, there have been signs the Orbital Reef
project was in trouble. The website for the project, created jointly by Blue
and Sierra, hasn't published an update on the station's development in more than a
year, and neither company has posted job openings that mention anything to do with
orbital Reef. Additionally, Sierra Space dropped references to orbital Reef in its most
recent press releases, focusing solely on its own inflatable habitat work now. Blue
Origin refused to comment directly to CNBC about the anonymous claim, but shortly before
the story was published, Blue made a post on x that says we continue
to make progress on our Commercial Destiny Nation's Space Act agreement with NASA and Blue
Origins vision of millions of people living and working in space to benefit Earth.
Our team is currently testing window frames and materials in a relevant space environment,
and they included a cool rendering of what the inside of a space station might
look like. Now, look, I'm not gonna sit here and try to
mock the complexity of building a window for a space station, especially windows as
gigantic as those on the orbital Reef concept art. That is obviously a very
difficult engineering project. But at the same time, if this is the best
post they could come up with to refute a news story claiming their space station
is in trouble, that they've been testing some window frames. Then Blue is
not exactly exuding confidence right now. They've made a couple follow up posts in
the meantime, and it looks like their social media team has added periodic mentions
of orbital Reef to their content calendar. But these are just broad generic statements
like orbital reef team is actively designing and test several deliverables to NASA and were
fully committed to working with NASA to ensure a continued human presence in Low Earth
orbit. So nothing of substance there. When NASA was asked for comment on
the situation, their spokesperson, Rebecca Wicks, told CNBC the agency has so
far paid Blue Origin twenty four million dollars of the total one hundred and thirty
million dollar contract amount for completing specified milestones. So looking again at these social
media posts and how often they reference NASA, it's pretty clear that Blue's primary
concern right now is making sure that NASA doesn't cut them off from the remaining
one hundred million dollars of taxpayer money. I don't know. To me at
least, it kind of reads like an office worker trying to look productive in
front of their boss. One very obvious reason that Blue Origin may have lost
interest in orbital reef is Blue Moon. After years of complaining and filing lawsuits,
Blue Origin was finally selected to provide a moonlander for NASA's Artemis p We
know that Jeff Bezos is obsessed with landing on the Moon, and after a
failed attempt to secure the HLS contract for Artemis three, the revised Blue Moon
lander was given the green light to land on the Moon with the Artemis five
mission. This contract includes three point four billion dollars in funding from NASA for
the design and manufacturing of the Blue Moon vehicle, so you obviously can't blame
the company for shifting priorities in this context. There is just so much more
at stake with the moon landing project than the space station, not just in
terms of money, although there is a lot of money involved, but also
in trying to make the Artemis program a success, returning a human presence to
the Moon, and ensuring that NASA remains competitive in their new space race against
the Chinese. Blue Origin also recently announced that they have a brand new spacecraft
platform in development called Blue Ring. The company is pitching this vehicle as a
multi orbit space mobility platform and they expect Blue Ring to be used for transportation,
refueling, data relay, and logistics, including an in space cloud computing
capability. They don't say this specifically, but it's very likely that Blue Ring
will be a necessary support vehicle for Blue Moon. So this all ties together,
and it even further illustrates that this company has shifted priorities far away from
orbital reef Let's shift the focus over to Sierra Space because this is the most
disappointing part of the story. While Blue Origin runs off to land on the
Moon, Sierra has essentially been left behind, which is frustrating because Sierra Space
is the company that's actually been delivering results. On the same day that Blue
Origin published their ex post about window frames, Sierra released a two and a
half minute video showing all of the work that has been going on with the
Dreamchaser vehicle and the inflatable Life module, And shortly after that, Sierra provided
some photos to NASA Spaceflight that show work being done on the Dream Chaser's Shooting
Star Cargo mo module. Real photos and videos of real people working on real
products, something that Blue Origin seems largely incapable of producing as much as orbital
Reef would be a major accomplishment for Blue Origin. It would really be a
significant platform for Sierra to deploy all of this cutting edge technology that they have
been working hard on for years. Orbital Reef wouldn't even be possible as a
concept without Sierra's contribution, so it does kind of feel like they're getting the
short end of the stick, though this does provide some hope for the future
of the orbital Reef concept because Sierra Space doesn't necessarily need Blue Origin in order
to build and operate an amazing space station. The Dreamchaser is very close to
being operational. Their first completed ship, the Tenacity, could have even made
its first mission to the ISS by now if it weren't for delays with the
Vulcan rocket from ULA. Sierra needs this new booster to get Tenacity into orbit,
but Ula has run into some pretty major setbacks, largely due to a
structural flaw in the rocket's upper stage, but partially also due to Blue Origins
exploding Bee four engines. So again, circumstances beyond Dreamchaser's control. But if
the first flight with Tenacity is a success and the vehicle makes it all the
way back down to the surface after completing the mission, then it could only
take a few years to get the vehicle crew rated. The SpaceX Dragon two
was the first ever crew rated commercial vehicle, and that took around six years
from the beginning of development at SpaceX to the first launch with astronauts on board,
so this can be done. The Life modules are also very close to
being ready for an orbital test, and unlike the Orbital Reef, the full
sized Life can be launched on any medium to heavy lift rocket, so Sierra
could easily book a trip on Falcon nine and get their first inflatable habitat into
orbit as soon as it's ready to go. Beyond that, with the internal
volume of a small house, the Life module doesn't really need to be birthed
to a gigantic structure like Orbital Reef one. Standalone, Life really only needs
to be connected to power, propulsion and a docking port, and it essentially
becomes its own space station. So we can at least look at one really
good thing to come out of this whole ordeal. It's unlikely that Sierra would
have been able to put in so much work and make so much progress on
their inflatable habitat without being attached to a marquee project like orbital Reef. As
amazing as it would be to actually see blue origins fantastic computer renderings brought to
life on orbital Reef, we're clearly not going to be there in twenty twenty
seven or anytime this decade. I'm not saying it couldn't happen someday, but
we wouldn't recommend holding your breath in anticipation