Jeff Bezos [Blue Origin] just unveiled his new rocket. And it’s a monster.

[Hamartia Antidote]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...st-unveiled-his-new-rocket-and-its-a-monster/

Jeff Bezos' Blue origin unveiled details of its New Glenn rocket with a chart showing how it compares to other orbital-class rockets. (Image courtesy of Blue Origin)

The New Shepard rocket that Blue Origin has been launching and landing is a fairly modest thing, 65 feet high, capable of getting just past the edge of space, some 60 miles up. But on Monday, Jeff Bezos' space company announced the design of its new, orbital rocket, a towering, more powerful behemoth designed to take people and commercial satellites to orbit.

In a blog post, Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, said the New Glenn rocket would come in two variants--a two stage and a three stage--that would be ready to fly by the end of the decade. Powered by seven BE-4 engines, they would have 3.85 million pounds of thrust at sea level. The rocket would be nearly as tall as the mighty, Apollo-era Saturn V that ferried the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

"Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step," Bezos wrote.

The announcement comes at a critical time for the commercial space industry, which aims to reduce the cost of spaceflight and open it up to the masses. Last week, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, performed the first test flight of its new spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, as it prepares to take paying customers into space. And Blue Origin, which also promises to move into the space tourism market, plans to fly a critical test flight of New Shepard, its suborbital rocket, next month.


Last week, the industry was jolted when SpaceX, the leader in the so-called New Space movement, suffered a catastrophic failure, when its Falcon 9 rocket ignited while on a Cape Canaveral launch pad and blew up in a spectacular fireball. The company is grounded while investigators try to determine the cause of the explosion, and that could lead to a delay of a launch of its new massive rocket, the Falcon Heavy.

Like the reusable New Shepard, the New Glenn's first stage would also be capable of boosting its payload into space, then flying back to the Earth for a soft landing. Bezos has said that being able to reuse rockets, instead of discarding them after each use as has traditionally been the case, is a key step toward lowering the cost of space travel. SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, has already landed several orbital-class first stages on land or on ships at sea.

In the statement, Bezos wrote that the company's mascot is a tortoise, a symbol from the fable the Tortoise and the Hare. Its motto is "Gradatim Ferociter" – Latin for "step by step, ferociously," he wrote. "We believe 'slow is smooth and smooth is fast.' In the long run, deliberate and methodical wins the day, and you do things quickest by never skipping steps," he wrote.

Bezos said the company plans to launch the New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 36, which it is refurbishing.

The naming for Blue Origin's rockets is a nod for the 60s-era Space Age, a time that Bezos has said has had a profound influence on him. New Shepard was named for Alan Shepard, who became the first American in space in 1961. A year later, NASA astronaut John Glenn pushed the boundary even further when he became the first American in orbit, circling the globe three times.


Then in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, which Bezos said would inspire his next venture.

While getting to orbit is a key step, he said it won't be the company's last: "Up next on our drawing board: New Armstrong. But that’s a story for the future."

 

[Abba_Dabba_Jabba]

I don't understand this business model of Elun Musk and Jeff, space industry is just too expensive. Only a government with strong economy can fund it properly.

 

[Tshering22]

I don't understand this business model of Elun Musk and Jeff, space industry is just too expensive. Only a government with strong economy can fund it properly.

Musk is more about creating a futuristic ecosystem. Look at SolarCity, Hyperloop and Tesla.

The space flights are actually an opportunity. It already is worth $40 billion.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/blue-origin-releases-details-of-its-monster-orbital-rocket/

Blue Origin releases details of its monster orbital rocket
The privately developed rocket will also be capable of 100 reuses, Jeff Bezos says.

After months of speculation, Blue Origin finally released more details about its New Glenn rocket on Tuesday. The 82-meter-tall rocket will have the capacity to lift 45 tons to low Earth orbit and an impressive 13 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. The two-stage rocket should be ready for its maiden flight by the end of 2019, company founder Jeff Bezos said.

New Glenn, named for the first US astronaut to orbit Earth, John Glenn, will also have a fully reusable first stage. In addition to remarks by Bezos at the Satellite 2017 conference in Washington, Blue Origin released a video showing the rocket's return to Earth. It will employ aerodynamic strakes for maneuvering during the return and will land on a barge. It is designed for up to 100 reuses. The rocket's return looks similar to that of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but New Glenn is a larger and considerably more powerful booster.

Were it flying today, New Glenn would in fact be the most powerful rocket on Earth. However, other large boosters are also under development that will likely fly first. SpaceX is building the Falcon Heavy, which will have the capacity to deliver 53 tons to low Earth orbit, and NASA is developing the Space Launch System with a 70-ton capacity.

Today's announcement, therefore, marks the beginning of a golden era of heavy-lift booster development. During the next few years, these three rockets will be competing on performance, price, and reliability. In addition to large satellite launches, they will also potentially enable NASA's deep-space exploration plans—including lunar exploration—and potentially missions to Mars. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX anticipate much lower operating costs than the government rocket, and both will be pursuing reusability. But as ever in the rocket business, it's one thing to show a video rendering a future launch. It's another thing to reach the launch pad, fly, and reuse.

During his talk on Tuesday, Bezos expressed confidence in the prospects for New Glenn, saying the company has learned important lessons from the development of its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft, which has already demonstrated low-cost reusability and could begin suborbital tourism flights as early as next year. "This is what is making it possible for us to build an orbital vehicle," he said. "The orbital vehicle is 100 percent informed by all of the lessons that we learned in the course of the New Shepard program, so it's very directly relevant."

Some critics have dinged Blue Origin for its initial focus on space tourism, saying the company isn't really serious about space exploration. But such criticism is misguided, Bezos said, noting that in the past, entertainment has been a driver for important innovation. "There are historical cases where entertainment turns out to be a driver of technologies that then become very practical and utilitarian for other things," he said, citing the early use of aviation for barnstorming, and GPUs originally developed for PC gaming now employed in machine learning

Whatever one thinks of New Shepard and its brief suborbital hops, however, there can be little question that New Glenn is a serious rocket. The booster already has a customer, too—Eutelsat has contracted with Blue Origin for a geostationary satellite launch. Moreover, New Glenn is also, as Bezos repeated Tuesday, "the smallest orbital rocket Blue Origin will ever build." In the future, even larger boosters are coming, such as the previously teased New Armstrong rocket. The tech mogul has recently said that lunar exploration is the next logical step for human activity in space.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/06/blue-origins-latest-rocket-engine-is-finally-complete/

Blue Origin's latest rocket engine is finally complete
CEO Jeff Bezos revealed the company's new BE-4 on social media.

After six years of development, the first of Blue Origin's new BE-4 rocket engines has finally been fully assembled. The company's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, debuted the images via a series of tweets.

https://twitter.com/x/status/838748139964272640

This engine, along with six more just like it, will form the primary powerplant for the company's upcoming New Glenn 2- and 3-stage rocket. The New Glenn, like its predecessor the New Shephard, will be a reusable space vehicle with a first stage capable of returning to the launch site and landing itself upright after each flight. The BE-4 engines will make up its first and second stage boosters, while the third stage will use an older BE-3 engine. And unlike the smaller New Shepard, the Glenn will have enough power (using either configuration) to put heavy cargo payloads and astronauts into orbit around the Earth.

https://twitter.com/x/status/838748973598900225

The New Glenn itself is still years away from its maiden voyage. In fact, the factory where it will be built is itself still under construction in Cape Canaveral, Florida. While the rocket itself is being constructed, the BE-4 engines will undergo rigorous certification at Blue Origin's West Texas-based test site. For his part, Bezos is confident that the ship will be ready and delivering goods to the moon by the end of the decade.