This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Commercialization

Blue Origin Goes Bigger Than Falcon Heavy

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
September 12, 2016
Filed under , ,
Blue Origin Goes Bigger Than Falcon Heavy

Blue Origin Announces Immense “New Glenn” Rocket
“Named in honor of John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, New Glenn is 23 feet in diameter and lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. Burning liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen, these are the same BE-4 engines that will power United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket. The 2-stage New Glenn is 270 feet tall, and its second stage is powered by a single vacuum-optimized BE-4 engine. The 3-stage New Glenn is 313 feet tall. A single vacuum-optimized BE-3 engine, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, powers its third stage. The booster and the second stage are identical in both variants.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

28 responses to “Blue Origin Goes Bigger Than Falcon Heavy”

  1. Beomoose says:
    0
    0

    Larger, though the thrust figures for Heavy are still bigger. The “New Armstrong” teaser is sure to make the “Moon First” hearts sing, too.

    Interesting timing on this announcement, after the recent big setback suffered by SpaceX but before Elon’s planned Mars architecture reveal.

  2. Yale S says:
    0
    0

    I wonder how the performance will differ?
    The New Glenn is 3.9 million pounds of thrust and the Falcon Heavy is 5.1 million pounds. The second stage of the NG is about 500k pounds while the FH is about 210k. (the raptor second stage is +500k)
    The tanks are much different in size, but methane is much bulkier.
    I hope they publish spec soon.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      The cryogenic third stage is a very big difference from the Falcon Heavy, as far as planetary launches are concerned.

      • Yale S says:
        0
        0

        That is the “upgraded” New Glenn. I am thinking about the base 2 stage version.
        I saw where Zubrin (apparently him) wagged a 70 ton LEO vs the 53 ton FH.

        • Matthew Black says:
          0
          0

          I’ve gotta wonder if Blue Origin doesn’t have a 3x booster concept not unlike F.H. ‘waiting in the wings’ as a concept?! Such a booster would possibly sound the death knell for SLS in all versions…

        • Jeff2Space says:
          0
          0

          Did Zubrin take into account the performance penalty imposed by the requirement to fly the first stage back to the launch site? My guess is that New Glenn is designed to minimize launch costs by maximizing reuse. This means that performance (payload to LEO) will *not* be optimized.

  3. TheBrett says:
    0
    0

    Zubrin said on Twitter that he figured it was good for 70 metric tons to LEO, 20 metric tons to TMI off of what they’d released in terms of data.

    I’m not necessarily interested in using it to go to Mars, but a potential heavy lift launcher is always good news. And if anyone can work out the logistics of making it profitable, it’s Jeff Bezos and his teams.

    • Matthew Black says:
      0
      0

      If Bezos were motivated (unlikely); he could redesign/uprate the most capable New Glenn to take on 4 or 6x of the same type of GEM-63XL solid boosters than Vulcan is going to use. With 6 of those boosters helping out and an uprated upper stage, it might be able to throw more than 30 tons to TMI instead of 20 – right there would be a booster Zubrin could imagine using for Mars Direct.

  4. Bob Mahoney says:
    0
    0

    Where’s the SLS in the line-up?

  5. MarcNBarrett says:
    0
    0

    If Blue Origin can pull this off, it will be very difficult for NASA to justify totally throwing away a complete “shuttle” main engine with every SLS launch, if Blue Origin and SpaceX can largely reuse rockets that are almost as big.

    • Jeff Havens says:
      0
      0

      Or play this in your head.. if SpX and BO succeed, *Congress* jumps on the bandwagon and tells NASA to go reusable or else no more money. Result? SLS in permanent development hell.

  6. ThomasLMatula says:
    0
    0

    Just the thing to move factories off the Earth 🙂

  7. Tim Blaxland says:
    0
    0

    Isn’t the jump from sub-orbital class 0.5 MN rocket to orbital class 17 MN rocket a little inconsistent with “Gradatim Ferociter”?

  8. Ben Russell-Gough says:
    0
    0

    Nothing like a little bitter personal rivalry between two entrepreneurs to drive size and capability developments! 😀

    • Jeff2Space says:
      0
      0

      This is the way capitalism is supposed to work as opposed to NASA’s SLS, which might as well be called the Socialist Launch System.

  9. Dante80 says:
    0
    0

    This is an extremely cool development.

    We had some trouble thinking in the past how the first orbital rocket by Blue was going to work. There was conflicting evidence out there, both from Tory Bruno (that hinted to a far smaller project, essentially a Delta II replacement), as well as Blue themselves (due to their gradatim ferociter motto and them saying that the first orbital rocket would be the smallest one too).

    This kept a lot of people scratching theirheads, since a BE-4 booster for a medium LV would be impossible to propulsively land (due todown-throttling limitations). So, many people had no idea how this was going to work.

    Little did we know that Bezos was planning for a monster like that! Seven engines will do the trick beautifully. This thing will be as heavy as FH, and will outdo it in GTO performance (and LEO performance too, for the 3 stage variant).

    It is extremely ambitious, but I think they do have the resolve and the
    resources to do it. The idea is to manufacture the LV in the Cape (they
    have already broken ground for the factory there), launch it from LC-36
    and recover the first stage some 750 miles downrange, on a very big
    barge (as they have stated on their application papers for the range, as
    well as in their patent application for downrange propulsive landing).

    This means that it will also stage higher and hotter than F9/FH too. It is a very big challenge, especially since they are stepping straight from
    New Shepard to this. Some may think that the leap is too big for their
    “gradatim ferociter” paradigm, but the only other way they could do this
    would be with a BE-3 first stage (which would not make a lot of sense,
    since they want to mass produce the BE-4).

    This is not unprecedented though. I view this like skipping falcon 1e and Falcon 5 for Falcon 9. At the time that it happened, a lot of people thought that Musk was crazy for considering it. They were wrong, and they can be wrong here too. Cheers..C:

  10. RocketScientist327 says:
    0
    0

    Isn’t free market capitalism awesome?

    Seriously this is real competition with SpaceX. And yes, I fully realize FH is bending metal and New Glen is a paper rocket but this just shows that it isn’t the “only NASA” crowd anymore.

  11. Neil.Verea says:
    0
    0

    Aren’t the same commentators praising BO and Space X on their Heavy lift rocket development, the same people that criticize NASA over why is a Heavy lift capability even needed?

    • Paul451 says:
      0
      0

      The issue isn’t heavy lift, it’s affordable heavy lift. SLS apologists always leave out that magic word.

      SLS is not affordable. Hell it’s not even merely “expensive”, by the standards of expensive launchers. It’s horrific.

      For the first twenty years of the SLS/Orion program, the average cost per launch will be six times the average Shuttle launch. The cost of an SLS launch will over ten times the current price of the next most expensive launcher in the world, Delta IV Heavy.

      And for what? Modified Shuttle tanks, modified Shuttle SRBs, 16 SSME’s literally pulled out of the retired Shuttle orbiters (and another 10-12yrs before they start delivering “brand new” copies of the, by then, half century old engine design.)

      • Neil.Verea says:
        0
        0

        Negative. That has not been the battle cry of those that oppose SLS, but, for argument sake suppose that were the issue. please tell us the expected life cycle costs over the next 20 years for SLS vs BO or Dragon. Of course you could pick a different time frame if it helps your argument.

  12. Neil.Verea says:
    0
    0

    Hmmm… and here I thought it was just old fashioned capitalism with a little help from the government.