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Jeff Bezos Unveils the Design of Blue Origin's Future Orbital Rocket -- New Glenn (theverge.com)
Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin said he would unveil details about his company's orbital rocket sometime "later this year." He is now delivering on the promise. Bezos has released some preliminary details about the "New Glenn" rocket which employs seven of the company's new generation BE-4 rocket engines. The rocket, named after the first American to reach orbit, is bigger than Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket. Bezos said he intends to launch the New Glenn in less than a decade from now. The Verge reports: The New Glenn will incorporate reusability, according to an email update from Bezos. The first stage of the rocket will be able to land post-launch, similar to how Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle lands after a flight. However, the New Shepard is only capable of going to sub-orbital space, so it's not traveling as fast or as high as a rocket going to orbit. Landing an orbital rocket post-launch will put Blue Origin in a whole new ball game. And it looks like there will be a lot of rocket to land. The New Glenn will be 23 feet in diameter and range between 270 and 313 feet high. That height depends on if there is one upper stage or two on top of the rocket. With just one upper stage, the rocket will be able to send satellites and people into lower Earth orbit (LEO). But with two upper stages, the New Glenn is capable of taking payloads beyond LEO. The main portion of the rocket will be powered by seven BE-4s, an engine that Blue Origin is currently developing. It's the same engine that the company hopes to sell to the United Launch Alliance to power the future Vulcan rocket. Combined, the BE-4s should provide 3.85 million pounds of thrust, according to Bezos. That's more thrust than the 2 million pounds the Delta IV Heavy is capable of, and slightly less than the 5 million pounds SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can pull off.Bezos said: Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step. It won't be the last of course. Up next on our drawing board: New Armstrong. But that's a story for the future.
Exactly. There is no harm in having multiple competing designs. It is preferable actually. As long as everyone is honest about expectations.
Except that SpaceX actually is flying stuff today, and this is a render and doesn't exist in the physical world.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Rushed into service 10 years from now?
Rockets blow up, cars crash, trains derail and we learn a little bit more every time it happens. Even the ULA's long stretch of mishap free launches is going to have a new risk when they are forced to do what Blue Origin and SpaceX have been proactively doing, develop new engines.
Commercial space launches are the present and the future in the US.
Suborbital has almost nothing to do with orbital -- it's off by orders of magnitude and involves completely different factors. Blue Origin has yet to fly a rocket that can be developed for orbital flight.
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