Rebuilding the company’s pad, or finishing a new one, will likely take at least a year, even with a major effort by Blue Origin, and drawing upon Jeff Bezos’ nearly infinite resources. One source familiar with pad rebuilds estimated that 15 months was a “best case” scenario.
A maturing design
You might wonder what the big deal is. SpaceX has been blowing up Starship rockets left and right, and the space nerds seem to be cheering them on.
The reality is that Blue Origin took a more traditional design route with New Glenn, as opposed to SpaceX’s iterative design, which seeks to test, fly, fail, and fix hardware. The New Glenn first stage had performed nearly flawlessly during its first three flights. It is a mature design.
Because of this, Blue Origin had reached the point where it was poised to begin near-monthly launches of the vehicle during the second half of the year, serving a variety of customers, from NASA to Amazon, AST SpaceMobile, and its own internal payloads.
With the Vulcan rocket also currently offline due to an anomaly, it once again places all of the US medium- and heavy-lift launch capacity in SpaceX’s basket, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
Speaking of Vulcan, if this is a problem with the BE-4 engine—and early indications are that the anomaly leading to Thursday night’s failure originated in the central engine of the booster—it would further compound United Launch Alliance’s difficulties in getting the large rocket back into service.
Blue Moon Mark 1
Blue Origin’s cargo lander has emerged as the supreme workhorse of the early stages of NASA’s Artemis program and Moon Base. It has a capacity to deliver up to 3 tons to the lunar surface and would serve as a pathfinder for a larger version of a lander to take humans to the Moon.
This week, NASA announced that its Moon Base I mission would fly on Blue Moon Mark 1, and it awarded Blue Origin $280.4 million to deliver two lunar rovers in 2028. Multiple other missions are planned on the lander, which was designed to be sent to the Moon on a single New Glenn vehicle.
Leave a Reply