Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
"Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter."
A few weeks ago, the topics of SpaceX and their competition came up, and although I was "non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed", I might have primed myself to fear disappointment by talking about Boeing's Starliner first. A year and a half ago Boeing were poised to be the ones to break SpaceX's current monopoly on United States crew launch ... and then they launched crew on a vehicle that still hadn't fixed all the Reaction Control System thruster problems from three years earlier, and they needed SpaceX to get them safely back down again.
It's a good thing I didn't quite finish this post yesterday like I'd planned, because today it's been announced that Starliner won't even try to fly humans again until after another cargo flight, and NASA's brought their contract down to 4 missions instead of 6. I don't think either side of that contract wants any part of it anymore; it's all trying to recover a fraction of sunk costs at this point.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, appears to indeed be moving from "gradatim" mode to "ferociter" mode!
After a number of minor delays, the NG-2 mission successfully launched New Glenn's first mission out of Earth orbit: two ESCAPADE spacecraft (buses by Rocket Lab, instruments by NASA and a few University labs) are now on their way to the Earth-Sun L2 point; after an Earth flyby late next year they'll be headed to Mars next. Despite the long-term SpaceX focus on Mars colonization, the Blue Origin + Rocket Lab combination will likely beat them to putting spacecraft in Mars orbit; even the SpaceX launch of Europa Clipper only included a Mars flyby, on the way to Jupiter.
The first New Glenn launch lost its booster due to engine relight failure; in NG-2 a little of the live video was lost, but the booster itself stuck the landing perfectly, as seen more clearly from more distant footage, making Blue Origin the second institution to accomplish a powered landing of an orbital rocket booster, with the second-most powerful rocket to ever be recovered, and the most powerful to be recovered on its own landing gear.
The landing was very inefficient, aiming far from the target initially (as SpaceX does too, to ensure that if engine restart for landing fails the rocket will instead impact at a point where it can't do any damage), but then taking a very slow, almost "hovering" horizontal slide over to the precise center of the landing pad, burning much more landing fuel than SpaceX's "hover slam" landings. Unintuitively, this is probably all a good thing for Blue Origin. First, it's a demonstration of the ability to hover, which although inefficient as a nominal trajectory, adds robustness when things go wrong. SpaceX is well over 500 successful landings now, but this is after burning through a test vehicle and multiple "splashdown" landings before they felt ready to risk a barge, followed by four or five failed landing attempts, all due in great part to the difficulty they had landing a booster whose Merlin engines couldn't throttle down enough to hover if necessary. Second, this is a good bit of context for the rumors (anonymous, but via a trustworthy reporter) that the first New Glenn vehicle capabilities were well under the design's target payload numbers. It's common for a new spacecraft to gain unwanted mass and so lose performance during the design and testing process, but this can sometimes be fixed with subsequent iteration, and that big plume of burning mass ought to be a relatively easy target for them to quickly fix. They've also announced a 15% improvement to each of BE-3 and BE-4 engine thrust, to be deployed on future missions, so they'll be getting performance back from reduced gravity losses on both the way down and the way up.
Adding metaphorical weight to the performance problem rumors was the removal of literal weight from their first launch, whose "Blue Ring Pathfinder" looked like a toy compared to the full "Blue Ring" spacecraft bus+vehicle they'd been working on. There's still no semi-firm launch date for the full Blue Ring, but they've released photos of their first flight vehicle, in production now and at least intended for launch early next year.
We've also now got pictures of a more impressive flight vehicle: the Blue Moon Mk1 cargo lander, to be launched to the lunar surface early next year. It's half the height and only a fraction of the cargo capacity of their planned Mk2 crew-and-cargo lander, which is itself tiny compared to Starship HLS, but until those are launched this will be the largest craft ever to land on the Moon, roughly a third bigger than the Apollo Lunar Module.
We've even been shown a glimpse of test hardware hinting at long term design work: a deployable hypersonic aerobrake, "saving significant mass and cost and enabling heavy cargo delivery from the Moon, to Mars, and point-to-point missions on Earth."
And finally, as part of that thrust improvement announcement, we got a look at their longer-term plans: a scaled up "New Glenn 9x4", with 9 first-stage and 4 second-stage engines (as opposed to the existing newly-renamed "New Glenn 7x2"), stretched to be taller than Saturn V thanks to the additional thrust, expected to give them roughly 50% more capacity to Low Earth Orbit and nearly triple their payload to Trans-Lunar Injection. The 9x4 still won't have as much TLI payload as even the Block 1 version of the Space Launch System, but this is still likely to be a little more beyond-LEO payload than a fully-expended Falcon Heavy, but with a much roomier fairing like Starship, from a rocket in a (partially-) reusable configuration - and unlike with SLS, Blue Origin has been designing with multi-launch mission plans and orbital refueling in mind. That payload to LEO (two thirds of the Starship V3 target, and twice what V2 was reportedly capable of) may end up being more important than the TLI numbers in the long run.
None of these future numbers from either company are guaranteed, of course. The first Starship V3 booster just got wrecked in a failed pressure test, pushing the next Starship flight back from "January" to "Q1". New Glenn was originally supposed to launch those Mars probes a year ago, but juggled their schedule a bit after they lost two New Glenn stages, one also to a test failure and another to worker mishandling, last year.
The obvious thing Blue Origin really still has to work on is cadence. In Fall 2024, Blue Origin was expecting to do 8-10 New Glenn launches in 2025; they ended up managing one in January and a second in November. Rocket Lab likes to brag that their Electron was the only commercial rocket to ramp up faster than Falcon, and that's a fair brag, because cadence is much easier said than done. The Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to fly at least 24 missions per year, ideally more like 50; they ended up at 4-6 with a peak of 9, and cut some tragic corners just trying to reach that. I think Blue Origin has the right design to start with, at least. The difference post-landing between their gleaming methane-powered New Glenn booster and the soot covered kerosene-powered Falcon 9 boosters is like day and night, and hopefully that lack of coking is going to make inspection and maintenance of the rocket internals easier as well. Blue Origin is still talking about doing one or two dozen launches in 2026. I'll be very surprised if they even come near the low end of that, but I'm hoping to be eating crow in a year.
Still, seeing two successful New Glenn flights in a row, including their first successful landing, is heartening. Blue Origin not only managed to land an orbital rocket under the wire of SpaceX's landing 10-year-anniversary, this year they've already managed a couple entries on my checklist of what SpaceX has been up to since:
And they're working on more, both in the next year:
and in the longer term:
They're still behind, but for the first time in decades it feels like they're not falling further behind. Space launch in the USA may soon actually have options other than "keep praying Elon Musk doesn't go full Howard Hughes" or "just go back to paying far more money to Boeing or Lockheed for a fraction of the results".
More options
Context Copy link