About that next New Glenn mission

I forgot to mention it in yesterday's post until the comments today, but the second flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has slipped out again.  

Around the end of May, Blue Origin's CEO, Dave Limp, called an all-hands meeting for the more than 12,000 employees.  Among the most critical items he discussed was the launch rate for the New Glenn rocket and how the company would fall significantly short of its goal for this year.

Before 2025 began, Limp had set expectations alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos: New Glenn would launch eight times this year.

However, since the rocket's mostly successful debut in January, five months have passed. At one point the company targeted "late spring" for the second launch of the rocket. However, on Monday, Limp acknowledged on social media that the rocket's next flight will now no longer take place until at least August 15. Although he did not say so, this may well be the only other New Glenn launch this year.

If you go to Next Spaceflight, you'll see the next three launches from around the world detailed on that landing page.  Below those there are eight buttons to get you to an individual company's next launches, which sometimes spread for many pages.  If you go to Blue Origin's page, you can count 18 launches that say NET 2025 (as always - NET means No Earlier Than).  Remember that launching in 2050 is Not Earlier Than 2025. 

All that aside, if they really intended to get 18 more launches in 2025, after their "one and done" - I can't see that happening.  The hold up to their launches that Limp talks most about is that they're not making enough second stages.  

That launch that was penciled in for August 15th is expected to be the second certification flight.  It has a payload that Blue hasn't released any information on and the mission will be called "Never Tell Me the Odds," in reference to the mission including an attempt to land the booster.  There are indications that the payload may be a NASA mission we've talked about before, ESCAPADE.

"One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster," Limp wrote. "This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We’re on track to produce eight GS2s this year, and the one we’ll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April."

In this quote, "GS2" translates to Glenn Stage 2. The only problem with all of that is that Limp and Bezos had set the goal of eight launches for this year and it looks they'll be lucky to get two (and I saw no mention of a third).  

On May 28, a couple of days after Limp's all-hands meeting, the chief executive emailed his entire team to announce an "organizational update." As part of this, the company's senior vice president of engines, Linda Cova, was retiring. Multiple sources confirmed this retiring was expected and that the company's program to produce BE-4 rocket engines is going well.

However, the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn's cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be "stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off" starting on August 15. It is unclear whether this departure was linked to Bezos' displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones' sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious.

A screen capture of the first couple of rows in Blue's backlog of launches on NextSpaceflight.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos' other (other-other?) company, Project Kuiper, is building satellites, but is said to have more satellites built and ready to launch than rides for them into orbit.  The next batch is scheduled to launch atop an Atlas V on Monday, June 16 at 1:25 PM EDT.  Although I'm sure Jeff Bezos' "gorge doth rise at it," there is one way everybody else uses when they need to get something in orbit.  It's that company a few launch complexes over, SpaceX.  (No charge for the tiny quote from Hamlet - as always)