There’s an easy knock on the space dreams of Jeff Bezos and his rocket company, Blue Origin: In its 24th year of existence, the company has yet to launch a single thing into orbit.
Blue Origin’s achievements to date have been modest — a small vehicle known as New Shepard carrying space tourists and experimenting with short suborbital excursions. In contrast, SpaceX, the rocket company started by another high-profile space billionaire, Elon Musk, dominates the launch market today.
On Wednesday, Blue Origin hopes to change the narrative by throwing a party for its new big rocket.
In the morning, at Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the doors opened to a giant garage. The missile, as tall as a 32-story building, rested horizontally on the trusses of a mobile launch platform.
The machine was mounted on a transport mechanism similar to many long mechanical centipedes, but with wheels, 288 in all, instead of legs. It began to roll slowly outward and up a concrete incline, a quarter-mile trip to the launch site.
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 will show great progress this year. I think people will see how fast we can move.”
Named New Glenn in honor of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, the powerful rocket will be capable of hauling about 100,000 pounds into low Earth orbit. That’s more lift than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, but not as much as the Falcon Heavy.
The New Glenn is one of several rockets expected to debut this year, adding to the 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. It used two of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, proving that their design lived up to expectations. New Glenn’s first stage will use seven BE-4s.
Later this year, Ariane 6, a rocket designed by the European Space Agency, is expected to make its first flight, and SpaceX continues to work on the massive Starship rocket that will carry NASA astronauts to the surface of the Moon.
Carissa Christensen, chief executive of BryceTech, a space consultancy in Alexandria, Virginia, said the wealth of Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, gave Blue Origin credibility from the start.
“You’ve heard that saying,” he said. “Rockets run on money. And so the depth of resources that this company has, the commitment of its founder, I think, makes it unique.”
But the luxury of billions of dollars may have meant Blue Origin didn’t always move with great urgency, he said. “Maybe that shifts you into a perfectionist model,” Ms. Christensen said.
Preparing for New Glenn’s maiden presentation
The rocket now on the Blue Origin launch pad is not exactly the one that will launch later this year.
The booster tanks are the ones for space, but the rest of the booster may or may not be used for launch. Also, the BE-4 engines have not been installed yet. The second stage and nose cone are just trial versions.
In the coming days, Blue Origin will practice filling the rocket’s propellant tanks.
A few miles away, a rocket factory is busy producing parts of 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 by 2020. Within a few years, a giant Blue Origin factory had sprung up on vacant land near the Space NASA’s Kennedy Center, but what went on inside remained a mystery to outsiders.
Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president overseeing New Glenn’s development, said the plant was empty when he joined Blue Origin in 2019.
“We’ve gone from a building with tape on the floor to everything you see today,” he said during a tour of the plant in late January.
The sprawling factory, spanning 650,000 square feet, is packed but not jammed with partially built missiles. Parts of the rocket enter one side of the factory and are assembled at stations that extend beneath the factory floor, which is four football fields long.
An upper section of a New Glenn booster towered in the middle of the factory, with huge fins on top. “It’s about 15 feet long, about eight feet deep,” said Jordan Charles, the vice president in charge of reinforcement. “They go up very little. They do a lot going down. They help guide the vehicle.”
New Glenn’s boosters will land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean and then launch again, for at least 25 flights. This is similar to how SpaceX lands and reuses Falcon 9 boosters.
Unlike SpaceX, which took a fail-until-you-succeed approach, Blue Origin hopes everything will work on the first try, and that its engineers already know enough from landing New Shepard’s much smaller boosters.
“The software, the guidance, it’s all similar to what we did on New Shepard, and it gives us a lot of confidence,” Mr Charles said.
Walking through a door, one enters another cavernous space, this one for the construction of the rocket’s nose cones, or fairings, which protect the payloads during ascent into the atmosphere. The New Glenn, at 23 feet in diameter, is wider than most other rockets and its fairing is twice as bulky as those used by leaner competitors, Blue Origin says.
After the launch pad tests are completed, the rocket will be moved back to the garage and the stages will be separated.
From there, Blue Origin will then begin assembling the final version of New Glenn for its first launch, installing the engines and testing them.
No start date has been announced. Blue Origin has not confirmed the first payload, but it may be two small identical spacecraft for NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or EscaPADE, mission that will study the magnetic fields around Mars.
Mr. Jones said he expected two New Glenn launches this year and hoped to speed up next year’s launches, up to one a month. Even coming close to that pace would be impressive.
It took SpaceX years to reach its breakneck launch rate, which now averages about 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, the tooling capability, the launch system to be able to go immediately to 12 launches a year,” Mr Jones said. Ultimately, the goal is 24 a year or more, he said.
From Kindles to space stations
Mr Limp is not so sure that a second New Glenn launch will go ahead this year. “It’s hard to look around that corner because you’re going to learn so much from the first launch,” he said. “I would just say, I’ll certainly be very happy if we have a launch this year.”
He became CEO of Blue Origin in December and at first glance seemed an odd choice to run a rocket company. He had worked at Amazon, overseeing the consumer electronics division that includes Echo smart speakers, Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets.
As part of that job, he did get some space experience leading Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which plans to launch a constellation of internet satellites to compete with 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 be able to replace Bob Smith, who had decided to step down as head of Blue Origin.
“My initial reaction was, well, 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. Lieb said. “We have buildings full of them. But what was needed was some leadership around the scale that Blue had become.”
He said his experience in consumer electronics — taking conceptual ideas, building prototypes, turning them into finished products and then building millions of them — could help. Blue Origin isn’t going to build millions of rockets, but it should build more of them faster.
Mr Limp also wants Blue Origin to make decisions faster. “Maybe what we were doing was looking for perfection in a lot of things,” he said.
Taking a little more risk “makes you move much, much faster,” he said.
Mr. Limp sees a future with many new business opportunities outside of Earth. “My view is that the demand for orbital launch vehicles is going to be much higher than people are predicting five years from now,” he said. “It’s not going to be like Blue Origin wins, SpaceX loses, or vice versa. There will be many winners.”
Blue Origin’s other projects include a lunar landing for NASA and the Orbital Reef space station. “They are building foundational capabilities for the long-term vision,” he said. “So there is a method to what we do.”
