Main Engine Cut OffThis Vulcan double-submission theory is something I’ve speculated about on the podcast and elsewhere in the past few months. The fact that we aren’t hearing the engine selection until the award announcement has me nearly completely convinced that’s the case.
A couple of takeaways from Blue Origin’s ninth New Shepard mission.
Blue seems to be trying really hard to limit the downsides of dual manifesting, and a single price for a ride to orbit no matter how you fly or when is a huge departure from the norm. It really only makes sense two ways: the entry price for a ride on New Glenn is shockingly low, or Blue will have no shortage of their own payloads to fly. Or both.
It certainly reads to me like they really want to see some details about what New Glenn could offer, and they want to know if Blue Origin would put a bid in for the launch.
Last week, China opened up their future space station to other nations, and Blue Origin laid some hints about their lunar ambitions. Both of these stories are indicative of what I think the next era of exploration will look like, and it has interesting implications for NASA.
Alan Boyle, for GeekWire, with a handful of BE-4 updates, including some behind-the-scenes insight on ULA’s decision and the testing issue last year.
Caleb Henry got a great scoop on some changes Blue Origin is making to New Glenn. I think through why these changes may have been made and what these changes could mean for the near future.
Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceflight wrote a great rundown of Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launcher that included a great little nugget of info at the end.
Maybe the change was brought about by the seemingly-slower ramp up of BE-4 testing, but nonetheless it gets them to the pad quicker, simplifies their production lines and operations, and allows them to hit just about every useful flight profile from day one.
This will only get really interesting when someone books a launch to use such a path, and any thoughts of consolidating all US launch infrastructure to a single location are nonsensical, but the possibility does enable some fun discussions for those working on Falcon Heavy and New Glenn, specifically.