While Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been knocking off successful flights of its suborbital tourist rocket New Shepard in Texas, work continues to get its massive New Glenn orbital rocket ready for flight from Florida.
Its first launch won’t be until 2023 at the earliest, but construction on the rockets continues at the Blue Origin factory next door to Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex on Merritt Island while testing continues at the reconfigured Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
“It’s rapid pace,” said Allison Caron, the Director of Program Management for the Launch Facility Development team in Florida. “2022 is the year for subsystem commissioning and integrated testing. We recently completed our upending system and checking that out. That’s going to take our horizontal transporter and vehicle to a vertical launch position.”
She said integration testing will be completed before the end of the year including simulators testing out the ground systems at LC-36. This week, the teams filled the site’s water tower to begin deluge testing, which is when launch providers spray hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to help dampen the extremely loud and potentially damaging acoustics created by a launch.
Blue Origin took over the lease for LC-36 in 2015, investing about $1 billion in the pad site alone. That’s out of more than $2.5 billion in overall cost to develop the New Glenn program, according to Bezos. It was previously used for government launches from 1962-2005 including lunar lander Surveyor 1 in 1967 and some of the Mariner probes.
“There’s quite a legacy to live up to,” said Caron. “The Atlas program launched 145 missions from our site. That included our first lunar landing and interplanetary missions to Mars and Jupiter.”
The launch site also includes an integration facility with room up to three New Glenn rocket boosters where all its parts will be put together to form the 313-foot-tall completed rocket with a fairing that’s 23 feet in diameter.
“We take those stages, we put them together in the integration facility, we put them on our transport erector, we go up the ramp, we mate to the pad, and then to the 20 ground systems that we have to support the rocket,” Caron said. “The beach is the best spot to see the site. You’ve got our 2 towers — our lightning towers — they’re 574 feet tall. They protect the vehicle while the vehicle’s out for its 8-hour stay, getting fueled and checked out before we launch.”
Once it’s finished, New Glenn, named in deference to astronaut John Glenn, will be bigger than any of SpaceX or ULA’s rockets equipped with seven engines for its first stage with a 50,000-pound payload capacity. Like Elon Musk’s Falcon 9, part of the rocket will be reusable, in some cases for up to 25 launches.
While Caron is getting the launch site in order, the exact date for an attempt has not been communicated by Blue Origin, which only confirmed this past spring that it would be beyond 2022.
Blue Origin issued a statement last week saying, “We don’t have anything further to share beyond what’s been shared publicly. We’re making great progress on New Glenn and we’ll fly when we’re ready.”
One of the major components holding Blue Origin back from an actual liftoff is the production of their in-house engines set to power the New Glenn — the BE-4. That’s because Blue Origin is putting its customer United Launch Alliance ahead of its own rocket so that ULA’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket, which will use two of the BE-4s, can take flight either in late 2022 or early 2023.
Already delayed from original plans to launch Vulcan before the end of 2021, the BE-4 engines set for its first flight left Blue Origin’s manufacturing facility in Kent, Washington last month and were shipped to a company site in Texas for acceptance testing. Next stop is ULA’s integration facility in Decatur, Alabama. Once installed, the first Vulcan rocket will be shipped to Florida for its first planned flight from ULA’s Space Launch Complex 41, just 6 miles north of Blue Origin’s launch site on Cape Canaveral.
ULA’s VP of Government and Commercial Programs Gary Wentz said in July that Vulcan is still on track for a launch before the end of the year, and that it has two certification flights on tap before the first of three launches for the Department of Defense in 2023. ULA continues to launch missions on its remaining stable of Atlas rockets that use the Russian-made RD-180 first-stage engines.
Congress passed a law in 2014 and amended in 2016 that requires U.S.-based DOD launches to steer away from Russian made engines by 2022, and the BE-4 satisfies that need. Other rocket companies such as SpaceX with DOD contracts already have engines made in the U.S.
New Glenn missed out on a lucrative Space Force contract in late 2020 awarded to ULA and SpaceX that would have given New Glenn more incentive to speed up readiness, but has since landed a slew of commercial launch orders, including a piece of Bezos’ plans for his company Amazon to launch thousands of internet satellites as part of the Project Kuiper constellation that would compete with existing constellations such as OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink.
Blue Origin was awarded 12 launches on its New Glenn with an option for 15 more as part of an Amazon plan for as many as 83 launches to send the majority of 3,236 satellites into orbit by 2029. Half of Amazon’s constellation has to be launched by 2026 under the current approval from the Federal Communications Commission, and hence the massive need for rocket launches announced earlier this year.
It awarded 38 to ULA’s Vulcan, which already has nine other launches lined up on its existing Atlas rockets. Also, the in-development Ariane 6 from Arianespace landed 18 launches.
A rocket like New Glenn has the most room among the three companies able to cram in around 60 of the satellites according to figures discussed by Amazon officials earlier this year. ULA’s Vulcan could handle about 45.
With Vulcan and New Glenn combined, the demand for BE-4 production will have to ramp up.
Customer ULA has at least five Vulcan launches tentatively planned before the end of 2023 not including any potential Project Kuiper launches, so the first 10 usable BE-4s would likely go to Vulcan. That means New Glenn will be waiting for seven usable engines to roll off the factory floor before it can take flight. In addition to Amazon, other New Glenn launch plans include commercial satellite customers OneWeb as well as the companies Eutelsat, JSAT, and Telesat.
Depending on the speed of production at Blue Origin’s factory in Washington, New Glenn’s first launch could be in 2023, but could delay even more.
But Caron said she feels exhilarated walking through the manufacturing complex back In Merritt Island, “where we bring metal in one side and rockets come out the other.”
Work on the rest of the first and second stages and fairings will continue just waiting on the engines that will get them to space.
“It’s packed with people, with parts, with assemblies, and the energy’s really strong here,” she said. “It’s humming right now.”
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