Blue Origin Moves One Step Closer to First Flight

Blue Origin took another step closer to the first flight of their New Glenn vehicle by finishing assembly of the first stage that will fly and rolling it to their launch pad on Tuesday evening October 29.  The long-awaited first flight is being talked about as "before the end of the year," contingent on passing some major test milestones between now and the first launch. 

Moving the rocket to the launch site is a key sign that the first stage is almost ready for its much-anticipated debut. Development of the New Glenn rocket would bring a third commercial heavy-lift rocket into the US market, after SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and Starship vehicles. It would send another clear signal that the future of rocketry in the United States is commercially driven rather than government-led. Critically, New Glenn is also designed to have a fully reusable first stage, which will attempt a droneship landing on its first flight.

The rocket will undergo two significant tests; first a WDR or Wet Dress Rehearsal in which it gets fully fueled and every aspect gets tested as if it was going to launch, stopping just short of starting the engines, and the second being like that but the engines will ignite and run a static fire test of some (currently unstated) duration.  

You may recall that Blue went through this sequence with the second stage in the last week of September (last story in a Small News Roundup). That was preparation for this in some sense; I mean, it had to be done before the entire vehicle can be stacked for launch and it probably was a good use of their launch pad facilities. 

These are the pivotal final steps before launch, but this is also a period when problems can be found. For example, this will be the first time the flight versions of the first and second stage will be mated and integrated, and then connected to the ground systems at Cape Canaveral. As the size of the transporter suggests, these are large and complex machines. Inevitably, there will be challenges in the coming weeks.

Blue's founder, Jeff Bezos, has been pushing to get New Glenn launched before the end of the year and time is getting tight.  You'll remember that the first launch for a New Glenn was originally supposed to be the ESCAPADE mission to Mars, which required launching during a narrow window between October 13 and 21; the end of the window wasn't even two weeks ago. NASA scrubbed that mission on September 6th, expecting that Blue couldn't get the vehicle ready to launch that soon. I think that was a good call.

According to the Date Calculator, this is day 305 of the year, meaning we have 61 days left (because being a leap year, the year is 366 days long). Is that enough time?  At best, it will be close. Eric Berger at Ars Technica (source article) uses a couple of paragraphs in a comparison with the first flight of the Falcon Heavy.  That first launch had the vehicle delivered to the launch pad on December 28, 2017, static-fired on January 24, 2018 and the liftoff of the first flight was on February 6. All of this work comprised 40 days. 

In my book, it's not a comparison that means anything. SpaceX had far more operational experience than Blue does; they had launched 50 Falcon 9s by then while Blue Origin has launched nothing.  SpaceX has demonstrated a "hardware rich" design philosophy, which tolerates more problems with smaller assemblies to learn more by testing more.  Blue is the opposite. Finally, SpaceX demonstrates remarkable speed in getting things done all the time. I don't believe that has ever been said about Blue Origin. 

That said, I wish them luck.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket rolls out of its hangar on Tuesday night. Credit: Blue Origin