The third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the first successful reflight of the company’s orbital-class booster, but ended with the failure of Jeff Bezos’ flagship rocket, a key element of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle slowly lifted off from the launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, firing seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 a.m. EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday.
The main engines, each delivering more than half a million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute and a half. Three minutes into takeoff, the booster shut down the engines and pulled away from New Glenn’s upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
New Glen’s first stage continued in a descending parabolic arc and briefly flew into space before heading toward the Blue Origin landing pad in the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. Restarting its engines for two brake burns, the booster settled into the ship less than 10 minutes after takeoff, foggy but on target.
The landing marked the end of the second flight for this so-called booster Never Tell Me The OddsAfter debuting with a good start and recovery on Blue Origin’s previous New Glenn mission in November. Blue Origin, founded and owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has repeatedly landed and reused the smaller New Shepard suborbital booster, but New Glenn surpasses New Shepard in difficulty and scale. It flies higher, travels faster and is three times taller than New Shepard.
Technicians installed new engines on the booster for Sunday’s flight, but Blue Origin plans to reuse the engines released in November on future New Glenn missions, according to company CEO Dave Limp.
The new Glenn allows Blue Origin to tap into a broader market for launches into low Earth orbit and beyond. SpaceX has shown that it can recycle a Falcon 9 booster for re-lighting in just nine days and launch the Falcon 9 five or more times in a week using reusable boosters and three active launch pads. Blue Origin officials expect the reuse of the New Glenn boosters to unlock much faster launch speeds for them.
