Blue Origin is targeting late spring for the second flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket.
Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, revealed the plan at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference in Washington, D.C. this week, adding that his team is keen to use the flight to achieve the first successful landing of the rocket’s first-stage booster.
In the maiden launch of the New Glenn rocket last month, the spaceflight company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had hoped to land the booster on a floating platform off the coast of Florida, similar to how SpaceX recovers the main stage of its Falcon 9 booster. But an anomaly occurred during the New Glenn’s descent, forcing Blue Origin to abandon the landing attempt.
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“We had most of the right conditions in the engine but we weren’t able to get everything right to the engine from the tanks,” Limp said in comments reported by SpaceNews. “We think we understand what the issues are.” He said the anomaly was down to “a combination of a couple things,” adding, “This was our first attempt at it. I don’t want to go into too much detail because we’re still going through the anomaly investigation.”
Regarding the payload for the upcoming New Glenn launch, Limp could only say that the company currently has a “couple of different options” for it, adding, “We sort of treat the first three flights as development flights. If we can get commercial payloads on them, we will do so. If it came to it and we just had to fly a mass simulator, we’ll fly a mass simulator.”
The 98-meter-tall vehicle is Blue Origin’s first orbital rocket. It’s notable for its large payload fairing, which features twice the volume of the standard five-meter class commercial launch systems. The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven BE-4 engines, and uses methane and liquid oxygen to produce around 3.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — considerably more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which creates around 1.7 million pounds of thrust, though less than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which produces around 5.1 million pounds of thrust.
Blue Origin will livestream the second New Glenn mission. We’ll have all the details on how to watch just as soon as they become available.