Blue Origin announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket today, Nov.5, intended to reduce the cost of manufacturing the rocket as well as increasing its capacity for payloads to high energy orbits well beyond low and medium Earth orbit as well as to the Moon.
Their stated goal is to, "launch more than 1000 times per year."
“There has never been higher demand for launch, ever,” Dave Limp, chief executive officer of Blue Origin, said during the UP.Summit conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.
Blue Origin has already begun test firing a new engine, called Northstar, that will eventually replace the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of New Glenn. Separately, the company also said it was developing a hydrogen-oxygen third stage for the rocket, GS3, to give it an extra kick.
The Northstar engine is a simpler but more powerful version of their present BE-4 engines. Limp said it has half the number of parts, 30 percent less mass, and about 65 percent can be 3D-printed.
Blue Origin believes it can manufacture the engine at 25 percent of the cost of a BE-4 engine, and eventually reach the point where each engine can be assembled in less than a day. The company is deep into development and testing of Northstar, having already begun a test-firing campaign.
Today's BE-4 has a thrust of 640,000 pounds and Limp said Northstar will have a starting thrust of 715,000 pounds - not quite 12% more. Like the BE-4 it's a Methalox engine - burning methane in liquid oxygen - using an oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle and a single-shaft turbopump architecture.
That's just the start. They're also developing a third stage for the New Glenn called GS-3 (Glenn Stage 3) designed to go between the second stage and the payload fairings. It will be usable by both the 7x2 and 9x4 first stages of the New Glenn.
According to Blue Origin, a GS3-equipped New Glenn 7×2 can carry 8 metric tons directly to geostationary orbit and 10 metric tons to translunar injection. Those figures increase to 14 tons and 20 tons, respectively, for the larger 9×4 variant.
The only thing they've mentioned in this information dump that seems questionable to me is that the GS3 will be powered by the BE-7 engine that they're using on their lunar landers. The issue is the engine is optimized for in-space operations and uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants. Hydrogen is, of course, the smallest atom there is, and therefore the easiest fuel to leak through pipes, tank walls and pretty much everything. While it has been used since the earliest days of spaceflight, there have been times during the preparations for the two Artemis missions that I've wondered aloud if everyone who knew how to work with it has retired or otherwise left the business (here, for example).
While it increases my pucker factor, Blue has been working with it on those BE-7 engines for a while and has already begun testing the tanks tentatively designed into the new GS-3.
The company recently had a breakthrough at Launch Site One in Texas, when it completed its first composite liquid hydrogen tanking test. During the test, the tank was pressurized to 100 percent of the maximum force expected during operation for 2.5 hours. It was even successfully tested at 150 percent of this maximum pressure for 10 minutes.
I honestly don't know what to think of that. It says the tank held 100% of the expected pressure for 2.5 hours. How many days does this tank need to hold that pressure?
The Northstar engine. Blue Origin is planning to build one about every 10 days. Credit: Blue Origin
I suppose the important answer to that "how many days" question is that Blue feels confident enough in the tanks to commit to the hydrogen/oxygen system on GS-3 and they've got a government customer that's comfortable enough to contract Blue Origin for a 2028 mission to cislunar space.
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