Minutes after 2 a.m. ET, a massive 320-foot-tall rocket slid down a rope at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and soared into the sky on a pale column of fire, briefly turning night into daylight along the way. I did. East coast of Florida’s Space Coast. About eight minutes later, the rocket’s large first stage booster failed to land on the barge in the Atlantic Ocean. Not exactly the desired result, but not unusual for a first attempt at getting the booster upright.
The early morning liftoff, a mission called NG-1, marks the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and marks the first orbital launch for the company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. It will be. With its successful first flight, New Glenn becomes the latest reusable heavy-lift rocket in the aerospace industry’s arsenal, increasing its launch capabilities and shaking up the launch market with its power and spacious fairing. It will be a tool that potentially promotes big science. A nose cone that protects a spacecraft’s payload during launch.
“This rocket is a unique new product with reusability and an oversized fairing that I think people are really excited about,” said former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garber. I’ll tell you.
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During his time at the space agency, Mr. Gerber helped drive investment in commercial launch services by companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now carries most of the cargo for spaceflight into low-Earth orbit and beyond. But competition is healthy. Lower prices while driving innovation and improvement. Rocket is no exception. Now, New Glenn’s entry into the launch market is under even more scrutiny as questions swirl about Musk’s role (and goals) in the incoming Trump administration. “With SpaceX and (Musk’s) notoriety, there’s a lot of interest in the competitors that are coming up, so I think there’s going to be a lot more attention on this rocket,” Gerber said. “I’m really hesitant to put all my eggs in one basket.”
“Reusability is the future of launch”
Currently, SpaceX is probably the primary launch provider for NASA and the US military. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet is also busy delivering the company’s proprietary Starlink communications satellites into orbit. But NASA already expects New Glenn, named after the late astronaut John Glenn, to send two spacecraft into orbit around Mars. And Blue Origin has other customers, including AST SpaceMobile, Telesat, and Amazon, and will eventually build a giant constellation of more than 3,200 communications satellites in orbit, known as Project Kuiper. (like Starlink).
“This is a big deal because we’re in an area where the demand for launches isn’t decreasing, it’s actually increasing significantly,” said Mike French of the Space Policy Group.
Founded a quarter-century ago, Blue Origin envisions a future in which “millions of people live and work in space for the benefit of Earth.” Its mascot is a turtle. This is a nod to the legendary competitors where slow and steady ultimately triumphs over a faster rabbit, and today it’s an obvious metaphor for SpaceX. Now, more than four years after its anticipated launch, New Glenn has finally taken flight (though for those keeping track, in 2015 Blue Origin was the first to launch and land a rocket with its New Shepard spacecraft). was the first successful company).
This maiden flight is designed to test the hardware’s rich cache. The rocket’s cargo-delivering upper stage now carries a 45,000-pound payload demonstrator called Blue Ring Pathfinder and a reusable first-stage booster called So You Are Telling. I have a chance. During the six-hour flight, Blue Origin personnel will thoroughly test Pathfinder’s flight, communications and operational systems, using a steady stream of information relayed between ground control and low-Earth orbit. . After liftoff, the 230-foot-tall first stage booster, powered by seven BE-4 engines providing approximately 3.8 million pounds of thrust, attempted to land. Jaclyn Atlantic barge named after Bezos’ mother. Of all the attempts this morning, landing successfully was probably the most difficult.
“We know it’s ambitious to land a booster for the first time, but guess what? We’re moving towards it,” said Arian Cornell, vice president of space systems at Blue Origin. mentioned in the launch webcast. “You might even say it’s a little crazy to try it on your first flight, but the data you get from flying the full mission profile is incredibly valuable.”
A successful landing is also the most important step toward achieving reusability similar to what SpaceX has already achieved with its own rockets. Blue Origin designed these boosters to fly at least 25 times.
“Reusability is the future of launch, and that’s how we drive costs down,” says Clay Mowry, CEO of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former Blue Origin executive.
“You don’t fly a plane, use it once, and then throw it away,” he says. “I think[New Glenn]is going to be a very important event for the entire space industry. It brings a lot of capabilities to the heavy-duty sector of the market.”
Bigger rockets, bigger science
When it comes to large rockets, we tend to focus on lift, but it’s not just the power that makes New Glenn stand out, Mowry said. “I think what’s even more amazing about that vehicle is the amount of volume it provides,” he says of the payload fairing that encases the cargo.
At 7 meters (23 feet) in diameter, New Glenn’s fairing is the widest on the market. This compares favorably with the standard 5-meter (16.4-foot ) is twice the volume offered by class rockets. 25th, 2021.
“I remember walking under[New Glenn’s payload fairing]and it was a really big space, and the engineers were standing there going, ‘Oh my God, this is huge.’ “It was like,” Mowry says, recalling his visit to the company’s factory. production facility. “I think this will impact their ability, the satellite carriers and their customers, to deploy things they never dreamed of before,” such as space telescopes.
When JWST was launched, it was folded like origami into Ariane 5 and packed as tightly as possible into a delicate telescope with a sunshade spanning 21 meters (68.9 feet) when fully unfolded. Ta. Upon returning, the team spent many days putting the equipment through a critical and complex installation sequence that included 344 single points of failure. The use of large rockets like New Glenn and SpaceX’s Starship, currently in development, may mean that future giant space telescopes won’t have to achieve such difficult extreme space savings. . Rather, a hollow payload fairing could spark “a different level of thinking about what’s possible from a space equipment standpoint,” said French, who is also a former NASA chief of staff. “As much as we get from space science, we’re always going to be constrained to some degree by launch: ‘What can we fit?'” How big is the box? ? ” says French. “On the technological side, there is ingenuity, just breakthroughs, that enable scientific breakthroughs. It’s always very impressive to meet and talk to the people who live at that intersection.”
NASA has rejected multiple requests from scientific american We’re here to talk to some of the agency’s most forward-thinking experts about how bigger rockets could impact future science missions. But government presentations have already referenced New Glenn (and Starship) in the design of astrophysics’ flagship Habitable World Observatory. The Habitable World Observatory is a space telescope designed to search for signs of extraterrestrial life on temperate, Earth-sized exoplanets around dozens of Sun-like stars. Similarly, NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE), which orbits Mars, would have flown to coincide with New Glenn’s first launch if it had launched in October 2024 as planned. .
“From a scientific perspective, more launches is a very good thing,” French said. “More launches will likely mean more competitive pricing, more timing options, and the ability to launch more.”
increase the number of people in the sky
Of course, scientific missions aren’t the only things aboard rockets of all sizes. The need to place military payloads, national security assets, and commercial satellites for Earth observation and global communications into orbit far exceeds what space scientists and their limited budgets currently require.
“Access to space is now extremely important to society,” Gerber said.
Indeed, the customer base for rockets like New Glenn will almost certainly be dominated by companies building large satellite constellations, such as Starlink, Project Kuiper, Britain’s OneWeb, and Canada’s Telesat. The reason is simple. Building these constellations requires launching a large number of satellites, and even more satellites fit into the much larger cargo space of such rockets. This means fewer launches and fewer launch costs.
“When you deploy a constellation of hundreds to thousands of satellites, access to space, being able to efficiently place those satellites in the right places in space, is a big cost factor,” Mowry said. .
Furthermore, such satellites are not designed for long lifespans. Therefore, as French points out, maintaining these constellations requires continuous updates to the in-orbit hardware, which requires high launch frequencies. “If you think of the market as a pyramid, there’s a large commercial group underneath that is driving demand,” he says. How many such constellations can safely exist in orbit remains an open question. However, such widespread demand will create space for less common and original applications – future projects that have not yet been imagined.
