Main Engine Cut Off

Blue Origin shed some more light on New Glenn yesterday by way of more details on the launch vehicle, a nice animation, and announcements of two customers—Eutelsat and OneWeb.

The two-stage variant can launch 45 tons to LEO and 13 tons to GTO. There wasn’t much of a mention of the three-stage variant with the hydrolox third stage, but the two-stage New Glenn will be more than enough for most payloads.

As far as the first stage landing goes, it will be on a ship, as we knew from previous documentation (and that whole patent lawsuit). The interesting thing is that Blue Origin’s recovery ship will be underway to provide more predictable stability. That means more ship-to-rocket communication than SpaceX’s system, which relies on each vehicle sticking to a predefined coordinate.

New Glenn’s six landing legs provide redundancy—one failed leg doesn’t compromise the landing. That’s something I always felt was missing from Falcon 9, and now ITS. I’m not surprised that a company with DC-X heritage would prioritize landing leg redundancy.

The first launch is slated for 2020, with the Eutelsat flight slated for 2021-22. It’s not yet clear how many demo flights New Glenn will fly before beginning commercial operations, but I imagine there will be at least a few launches.

That puts the first flight of New Glenn right alongside the first flight of Vulcan-Centaur, which will most likely use the BE-4 on its first stage. That should be official within weeks, since the first fully-assembled BE-4 is headed to Texas for a hot fire. Once fired successfully, if all goes well, ULA will officially select BE-4 to power Vulcan.

An engine on its way to the test stand, 2 customers signed on for 6 launches, a factory well underway in Florida—things are progressing well for New Glenn.