Blue Origin will refurbish its first landed New Glenn booster for a faster flight tempo
How quickly can a heavy-lift rocket prove it can fly, land, and fly again without turning every mission into a bespoke refurbishment project?
Blue Origin has chosen to answer this question with the next launch of New Glenn by reusing the first stage that successfully landed after the second flight of the vehicle. The NG-3 mission has been scheduled no earlier than late February from Cape Canaveral, and there is a payload swap that illustrates the reality that new launch services must confront: the launch vehicle is ready to get into its stride, while some spacecraft are still qualifying.
The booster that is scheduled to fly back is “Never Tell Me The Odds,” which is the first New Glenn first stage to fully recover after the NG-2 mission, which flew the NASA ESCAPADE mission. NG-1 reached orbit but did not recover its booster, and thus the NG-2 mission marked the first full step towards regular reuse. For the NG-3 mission, Blue Origin is scheduled to fully recover the same stage, with the hope of having a turnaround time of months, as opposed to the yearlong turnaround times that were experienced in the first wave of orbital booster recovery.
At the same time, Blue Origin has been trying to make reuse less of an exception and more of a rule. The company says that “improvements, beginning with NG-3, include propulsion and vehicle enhancements to better payload performance and launch cadence, and these enhancements apply to avionics, structures, recovery, and thermal protection.” Some of the most specific numbers that have been suggested include an increase in the total thrust of the seven BE-4 engines on the booster from 3.9 million lbf to 4.5 million lbf, and an increase in the upper stage’s two BE-3U engines from an original design point of 320,000 lbf to 400,000 lbf over the next few flights. Blue Origin has also pointed to hardware improvements that are less about press releases and more about figuring out the timeline, such as a reusable fairing design, a lower-cost tank design, and a reusable thermal protection system.
The payload of the mission also emphasizes the increasing link between cadence and reuse and customer confidence. The NG-3 will be transporting AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7, which is a satellite constellation that will provide direct-to-device broadband connectivity. AST has announced that it intends to launch 45 to 60 satellites by the end of 2026, and in future missions of New Glenn, it may carry up to eight satellites simultaneously. The reason for AST’s interest in New Glenn is quite obvious. The first expected mission for New Glenn’s third mission was the uncrewed Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander, which is now named Endurance. This mission is currently in the midst of environmental qualification testing, which includes a relocation for thermal vacuum testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Blue Origin has also mentioned a direct field acoustic test that replicates the environment of the New Glenn payload fairing, with the company’s Chief Executive, Dave Limp, stating: “We set up a ring of speaker towers, each 34 feet tall, around the fully integrated lander to generate a near-diffuse acoustic field, simulating the New Glenn payload fairing environment at over 138 decibels overall sound pressure level.”
Thus, NG-3 is a pressure test of two timetables at once: the spacecraft software that need launch capability, and the rocket software that need repetitions. If New Glenn can successfully refurb and re-launch a landed first stage in the early stages of its operational life, it will change the booster from a proof-of-concept piece of hardware to infrastructure, and exactly what commercial players want when they start to think about constellations in the dozens rather than single missions.
