Blue Origin Introduces New Glenn, its Reusable, Vertical-Landing Booster

The proposed New Glenn rocket – named after John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit around the earth – will come in 2- and 3-stage versions, the latter more than 300 feet tall.

The BE-4 engine that Blue Origin is developing for its own orbital rockets, each producing 550,000 pounds of thrust, is also the leading candidate to power United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket.

The New Glenn, undoubtedly, could change the situation and bring the company’s launch capabilities to a new high. It will also have a huge sea-level thrust of nearly 3.85 million pounds. The second stage will be powered by a single, vacuum-optimized variant of the BE-4, Bezos said.

And larger is not the half of it. This puts it right into SpaceX’s Falcon 9 territory which has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to ferry cargo and various supplies to the International Space Station.

New Glenn will be built at Blue Origin’s future manufacturing facility. However, Falcon Heavy will top that off with its five million pounds of thrust. But on Monday, Jeff Bezos’ space company announced the design of its new, orbital rocket, a towering, more powerful behemoth created to take people and commercial satellites to orbit.

The New Glenn rocket, which is expected to be ready to fly in a decade, will be launched from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36. What’s more, many of these rockets are being built to provide re-usability. The first stage of the booster is being created to fly a minimum of 25 missions. It plans to use this rocket for space tourism. Its height varies between 270 and 313 feet high based on whether one or two additional stages are added to the top of the rocket.

Blue Origin is also planning to manufacture a three-stage version of the rocket that should be able to fly payloads beyond Earth’s orbit, according to the billionaire founder of Amazon, the online retail giant. It is a two-stage rocket and is reusable. “Bezos and Musk have different takes on business”.

“Our vision is millions of people living and working in space”, Bezos [pictured above] said in the email. “It won’t be the last of course”, he wrote.

He said a vehicle named “New Armstrong” – presumably after first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong – was next up on the company’s drawing board. “But that’s a story for the future”, Bezos wrote.

Armstrong? If Glenn is the name of an orbital rocket than Armstrong should be….right? So far, Blue Origin has named each of its launch vehicles after the US astronaut that first accomplished that feat. Along with its solid-rocket boosters, the shuttle had 7 million pounds of thrust at launch.

However, that is all merely hearsay at this point.

SpaceX is planning the launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket in early 2017, but the maiden voyage has already been delayed several times.