After more than a decade of development, hype, and pent-up demand, Jeff Bezos' aerospace venture Blue Origin will finally attempt to launch the New Glenn rocket into orbit.
After more than a decade of development, hype, and pent-up demand, Jeff Bezos' aerospace venture Blue Origin will finally attempt to launch the New Glenn rocket into orbit.
The launch of New Glenn was planned for 2020, but has been postponed for a long time, writes Bloomberg. The rocket is due to take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, soon.
The mission’s goal is to launch a Blue Origin test satellite into orbit, then land the lower part of the rocket on an unmanned craft in the Atlantic Ocean.
The flight, the publication writes, will be an important milestone in the history of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company, which, although it was engaged in sending tourists into space, did not have the technical capabilities to send satellites into orbit.
This contrasts with the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was operating at about the same time as Blue Origin but has far surpassed Bezos’s company in rocket launch capabilities. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is currently the most productive orbiter in the world.
A successful launch of New Glenn would finally put Bezos' company, if not on par with SpaceX, then at least create some competition in this high-tech niche.
Bezos officially announced plans for New Glenn in 2016, although the rocket had been in development for years before that. At the same time, Blue Origin faced numerous obstacles and delays, including the development of its in-house-built BE-4 main engines.
Unlike SpaceX, which conducts frequent test flights (some of which are unsuccessful), Blue Origin has taken a more traditional engineering approach: years of painstaking behind-the-scenes development before attempting a full test flight to minimize any unplanned risks.
«However, most new rockets fail on their first launch. A successful debut would showcase Blue Origin’s engineering prowess and be a major achievement in Bezos’ bid to catch up with SpaceX,» writes Bloomberg.
Blue Origin also hopes to demonstrate the potential for reusability of New Glenn: similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, New Glenn’s main core is designed to return to Earth after launch and vertically land on a barge called Jacklyn.
New Glenn also boasts some capabilities that Falcon 9 does not have: for example, it will be able to launch heavier payloads into higher orbits.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that Jeff Bezos plans to launch thousands of communications satellites, an alternative to GPS, to counter the ever-increasing signal jamming from the Russians.
