In September 2016, Jeff Bezos unveiled the New Glenn rocket, with a launch scheduled for 2020.

The name, Bezos explained, is in honor of John Glenn. Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth.

Since the announcement, lots of progress has been made on all aspects of the rocket, as it approaches its inaugural flight this month (November 2024).

What is New Glenn?

New Glenn is a 98 m (322 ft) tall and 7 m (23 ft) wide rocket, capable of carrying 45,000 kg (99,000 Ib) to LEO. The rocket consists of two stages, GS1 and GS2.

The first stage of the rocket, known as GS1, is powered by seven powerful BE-4 (Blue Engine - 4) engines. It is being designed and built to fly a minimum of 25 flights per stage. After staging, it will land at Jacklyn, a ship purchased by the company in 2018 to serve as a landing platform for New Glenn. It is named in honor of Bezos’s mum, Jacklyn Bezos.

BE-4s under New Glenn. (Credit: Blue Origin)

The BE-4 is Blue Origin’s most powerful engine, being capable of up to 100 flights. At full power, its sea level thrust can reach a whopping 2.4 MN (550,000 Ibf). It runs off liquid oxygen & methane, the same as the Raptors that power the Starship, making it what’s called a liquid-fuel engine.

A liquid-fuel engine burns, as the name indicates, liquid propellants. Most engines are liquid-fuel but there is also another type: solid-propellant engines. Solid-propellant engines are usually more powerful, but they can’t be relighted or shut down once started up and are also harder to throttle.

Its second stage, GS2, is powered by two BE-3U engines, the vacuum version of those used on the sub-orbital New Shepard vehicle. Those two liquid-fuel engines each produce a thrust of 712 kN (160,000 Ibf) in vacuum. BE-3U runs off a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

Blue Origin is working on the reuse of GS2 under Project Jarvis. If they succeed, the rocket would be fully reusable, such as SpaceX’s Starship or Stoke Space’s Nova.

Story of BE-4

The BE-4 engine has had a long history of delays. It started development in 2011, being presented to the public in September of 2014. Shortly after, ULA selected BE-4 for Vulcan, and Blue Origin stated that the “BE-4 would be ready for flight by 2017”. After some issues and delays, on Halloween night of 2022, Blue Origin tweeted saying the two engines had finally been shipped over to ULA.

Since then, Vulcan has successfully lifted off twice, both with a spot on performance. The engines came to the rescue on Vulcan’s second flight as a nozzle blew off from one of the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), so the engine had to compensate for the slight performance loss.

Vulcan SRB anomaly. (Credit: Adam Bernstein / Spaceflight Now)

Plans of New Glenn

New Glenn is set to be Blue Origin’s workhorse for the next decade, as it will be their only orbital rocket for a while.

The rocket will play an important role in taking humans back to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis Program since Blue Moon, the private company’s lunar lander, is set to perform a crewed landing on the south pole of the Moon on the Artemis V mission.

Blue Moon MK2 will be the one for lunar crewed flights, but the company plans to land an uncrewed, less-powerful version, Blue Moon MK1, as early as March 2025. That schedule is considered ambitious, as there has been very little progress shown on the lander.

Blue Origin also got a contract in 2022 from Amazon to launch most of their Project Kuiper satellite mega-constellation, along with Arianespace and ULA.

“New Glenn’s massive seven-meter fairing offers unprecedented mass and volume capabilities, and provides Project Kuiper maximum launch flexibility.” said Jarrett Jones, the Senior Vice President of New Glenn at Blue Origin.

The ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission is scheduled to be launched by a New Glenn no earlier than Spring 2025. It will send two twin spacecraft to orbit Mars, with the goal of understanding the red planet better, especially its magnetosphere.

Overall, New Glenn has tons of flights scheduled, most of them with Amazon. The rocket will be very important for Blue Origin and for its contractors, which include the vastly important human landing system contract from NASA.

Road to Flight One

From the business end up to the payload fairing

In this section, we will talk about how every component is getting ready for the Inaugural Flight, starting from the launch pad and ending at the payload fairing.

New Glenn’s inaugural flight is expected to lift-off no earlier than late November 2024 out of LC-36 (Launch Complex 36), Cape Canaveral SFS (Space Force Station).

New Glenn simulator with LC-36 in the background. (Credit: Blue Origin)

LC-36 has quite a history, having supported 145 launches since its debut in 1962, with the Atlas-Centaur rocket. Blue Origin has been in control of the pad since September of 2015.

GS1 will be called “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance”, according to the company’s newly-appointed CEO, Dave Limp. On the 27th of August, Blue Origin tweeted “We recently completed our final major mate operation on #NewGlenn’s 188-foot first stage, merging the aft with the mid module.” This stage received its seven mighty BE-4(s) around the 24th of October. Finally, after years of development, the rocket moved to its launch pad the day before Halloween 2024.

Shortly after launch, the first stage is expected to return to Jacklyn (the landing vessel), similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Heavy booster returning to a droneship. To conduct this maneuver, the booster will need to deploy its six landing legs. A successful test of these legs, which are now stacked, was conducted in July.

Jacklyn arrived at Port Canaveral in September.

To guide the rocket towards Jacklyn, New Glenn will use four fins located on top of the booster, which were tested in August. Limp stated that the aerodynamic forces pushing on the fin during flight are roughly equal to the weight of a 737 aircraft. As previously noted, these fins are currently awaiting launch, stacked upon its booster.

The second stage is fully stacked and completed a hotfire test on the 23rd September. This hotfire seemed phenomenal, but a few days later, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection said they used the deluge system without permission. The appropriate permission was given on November 6th.

Second stage hotfire (Credit: Blue Origin)

The stages for Flight Two and Flight Three have not progressed as smoothly. For Flight Two, the “upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar" and for Flight Three “another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded”, Bloomberg reported. These issues don’t seem to have affected the Flight One schedule.

Very little is known about the 7m (23 ft) payload fairing. It performed drop tests early this year with non-flight hardware, but there is almost no information on the Flight One hardware.

Overall, we hope Blue Origin succeeds with New Glenn, and we get to see the ramifications of its success in the near future.

Update: Blue Origin has just announced by a post on X they have mated both of New Glenn’s stages.