Tag: Blue Origin

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Blue Origin supersizes New Glenn rocket for heavier tasks

Illustration: New Glenn rocket lifting off with moon in the sky above
An artist’s conception shows Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket with nine BE-4 engines on its first stage. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Just a week after a successful launch of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it will make New Glenn even heavier.

The new super-heavy-lift variant of Blue Origin’s most powerful rocket, known as New Glenn 9×4, will feature nine methane-fueled BE-4 engines on the first stage, up from seven; and four hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines on the second stage, up from two. The 9×4 rocket will also have a bigger fairing, or nose-cone section, measuring 8.7 meters (28.5 feet) wide, as opposed to 7 meters (23 feet) for the fairing currently in use.

Blue Origin says it’s working to enhance the performance of the rocket engines on both the New Glenn 9×4 and the standard 7×2 model. Other upgrades will include a reusable fairing, a lower-cost tank design and a higher-performing thermal protection system.

The upgrades will be phased into upcoming New Glenn missions starting with the next launch, which is expected to occur early next year. “These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low Earth orbit, the moon and beyond,” the company said in an online update.

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Blue Origin sends probes to Mars and brings back booster

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida launch pad
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida launch pad. (Blue Origin Photo via Dave Limp / X)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent twin orbiters on the first leg of their journey to Mars today, marking a successful sequel to January’s first liftoff of the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn launch vehicle.

The trouble-free launch of NASA’s Escapade probes, plus today’s first-ever recovery of a New Glenn booster, bolstered Blue Origin’s status as a worthy competitor for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has come to dominate the space industry. SpaceX is the only other company to bring back an orbital-class booster successfully.

New Glenn — which is named after John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit — rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT). Today’s liftoff followed earlier attempts that had to be scratched, initially due to cloudy weather on Earth, and then due to a solar storm in space.

Minutes after New Glenn rose into the sky, the mission plan called for the rocket’s first-stage booster to fly itself back to a touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic that was named Jacklyn after Bezos’ late mother. Blue Origin’s first attempt to recover a New Glenn booster failed in January — but this time, the maneuver was successful.

That achievement was greeted by wild cheers from Blue Origin team members watching the webcast, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control and a crowd at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The uncertainty about recovering the booster was reflected in the nickname it was given: “Never Tell Me the Odds.”

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Cosmic Space

Flight log: Six spacefliers go suborbital with Blue Origin

Liftoff for Blue Origin New Shepard rocket
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket ship rises from its Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent six more people on a brief suborbital space trip today aboard a New Shepard rocket ship. The flight, known as NS-36, was Blue Origin’s 36th New Shepard mission and the 15th crewed flight.

Today’s 10-minute flight was conducted at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. It followed Blue Origin’s standard procedure, with liftoff coming at 8:40 a.m. CT (6:40 a.m. PT). The reusable booster sent the crew capsule to a height of 65.7 miles (346,791 feet, or 106 kilometers), and then flew itself back to a landing pad.

Meanwhile, the crew got out of their seats to float in zero gravity and look out the windows at the black sky of space and the Earth below. They got back in their seats for a parachute-aided descent that ended with touchdown at 8:50 a.m. CT (6:50 a.m. PT).

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Jeff Bezos sees orbital data centers as ‘next step’ in space

Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week 2025
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, speaks at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. (Italian Tech Week via YouTube)

What’s the next killer app for the final frontier? According to Jeff Bezos, it’s a future fleet of gigawatt data centers, flying in orbit and powered by sunlight.

Bezos — who founded the Amazon retail giant as well as his privately held Blue Origin space venture — pointed to the prospects for orbital data centers on Oct. 3 during a fireside chat at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. He cast the technology as the most cost-efficient way to satisfy the tech industry’s need for more power to fuel advances in artificial intelligence.

But don’t expect cloud computing to leave Earth behind immediately. Bezos estimated that the transition from Earth-based to space-based data processing would take more than 10 years.

“I bet it’s not more than 20 years,” he said. “We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. So, these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7.”

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Blue Origin and Luxembourg will map moon resources

Illustration: Oasis-1 satellite in lunar orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Oasis-1 satellite mapping water ice deposits on the moon. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’s working with partners in Luxembourg on a campaign called Project Oasis, which aims to identify and take advantage of valuable resources on the moon.

The project’s first mission, known as Oasis-1, will send a small satellite into lunar orbit to map reserves of water ice, helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals and other materials that could be used by space settlers or sent back to Earth.

“Once we know what’s really there and how to access it, everything changes,” Pat Remias, vice president for advanced concepts and enterprise engineering at Blue Origin, said today in a news release. “Project Oasis creates the foundation for a thriving space economy that benefits everyone, including the billions of individuals on Earth who will benefit from space-based resources.”

Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has already been working on a project called Blue Alchemist, which focuses on technologies that can process moon dirt to produce the components for solar cells and transmission wires. Another promising avenue involves turning deposits of water ice into drinkable water — and turning that H2O into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant.

Such technologies could be applied broadly to in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, on the moon as well as on Mars and in asteroid mining operations.

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Blue Origin plans to expand suborbital space program

Blue Origin New Shepard lifts off
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket ship lifts off for a suborbital mission in June. (Blue Origin Photo)

The executive in charge of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital space program has laid out plans to scale up the operation for weekly launches — and says the company is looking into setting up a second launch site, perhaps outside the U.S.

Phil Joyce, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for New Shepard, discussed the road ahead over the weekend at the Global Spaceport Alliance’s International Spaceport Forum in Sydney, Australia. His remarks were reported by Aviation Week as well as SpaceNews.

Customer demand is a major factor behind the expansion plans. “The demand is really strong,” SpaceNews quoted Joyce as saying. “We’re continuing to see sales every week, every day.” Blue Origin’s backlog reportedly extends more than a year out.

To meet the demand, Jeff Bezos’ space venture plans to phase in three next-generation New Shepard rocket ships starting next year, Joyce said. Those vehicles would be powered by an upgraded version of Blue Origin’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine.

The plan calls for retiring the two reusable rocket ships that are currently carrying crew by the end of 2027.

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Fiction Science Club

How billionaires boost America in space race with China

Blended image of Elon Musk celebrating after launch of NASA astronauts, and Jeff Bezos celebrating after first crewed New Shepard launch
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have both celebrated space victories. (Left: GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota, 2020. Right: Blue Origin Photo, 2021)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has only just begun to launch a heavy-lift rocket that was a decade in the making — its orbital-class New Glenn launch vehicle, which had its first flight in January. But it’s already planning something even bigger to rival Starship, the super-rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Bezos simply isn’t ready to share those plans yet.

Actually, a super-heavy-lift rocket concept known as New Armstrong (named in honor of first moonwalker Neil Armstrong) has been talked about for almost as long as New Glenn (whose name pays tribute to John Glenn, the first American in orbit). Bezos mentioned the idea way back in 2016, but said at the time that it was “a story for the future.”

Details about New Armstrong are still a story for the future, according to an account in “Rocket Dreams,” a book about the billionaire space race written by Washington Post staff writer Christian Davenport.

“They’ve been very quiet about it,” Davenport says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I asked Jeff specifically about that at the New Glenn launch, and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

In the book, he quotes Bezos as saying only that “we are working on a vehicle that will come after New Glenn and lift more mass.”

New Armstrong is one of the few mysteries that Davenport wasn’t able to crack in his account of the space rivalry between Bezos and Musk. Davenport first addressed that rivalry seven years ago in a book titled “Space Barons,” but this updated saga is set in the context of an even bigger rivalry between America and China. Both nations are aiming to send astronauts to the moon by 2030, if not before.

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Blue Origin will work on getting VIPER rover to the moon

Illustration: VIPER rover and Blue Moon lander on the moon
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s VIPER rover and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander on the lunar surface. (Blue Origin Illustration)

NASA has selected Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to help it resurrect a mission to send a robotic prospector to the moon’s south polar region.

Blue Origin will be tasked with drawing up a plan to deliver the VIPER rover to the moon in late 2027, using its uncrewed Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander. This would be Blue Origin’s second lunar lander. The first lander is due for launch as early as this year, with the objective of delivering NASA’s SCALPSS camera system and a retroreflective array to the lunar surface.

The newly announced task order, known as CS-7, was awarded through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and has a total potential value of $190 million.

“NASA is leading the world in exploring more of the moon than ever before, and this delivery is just one of many ways we’re leveraging U.S. industry to support a long-term American presence on the lunar surface,” acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said today in a news release.

VIPER is designed to explore permanently shadowed regions near the moon’s south pole for signs of volatile materials, including water ice. Such ice could be extracted to produce drinkable water and breathable oxygen as well as hydrogen for rocket fuel. VIPER is an acronym that stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover.

Duffy said the VIPER mission will “help inform future landing sites for our astronauts and better understand the moon’s environment – important insights for sustaining humans over longer missions, as America leads our future in space.”

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How AI and other tech trends are boosting space ventures

Illustration: Blue Origin's Blue Ring transfer vehicle in orbit
The first mission for Blue Origin’s Blue Ring orbital vehicle, set for next year, reflects multiple trends in the space industry. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Artificial intelligence and other technological trends are smoothing the way for commercial space ventures ranging from multibillion-dollar companies to a new wave of startups.

It probably comes as no surprise that Blue Origin, the space company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is taking advantage of AI. “You can imagine this is a favorite area of our founder,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn strategy and business operations. “So, just generally, we are using it across the board.”

But other AI-fueled applications might raise an eyebrow. For example, Rebel Space is helping satellite companies generate synthetic data that could point to a potential valve failure long before the spacecraft is launched. “The AI you trained would see it, and you would prevent a massive mission failure in the future,” said Carrie Marshall, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

Cornell, Marshall and other executives reflected on the trends accelerating the space industry this week during the Seattle Space Superiority Summit, presented on Sept. 11 by FUSE VC at the Museum of Flight.

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NASA funds studies focusing on orbital transfer vehicles

Illustration: Blue Ring vehicle in orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Blue Ring space platform in orbit. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is among six companies that will be producing studies for NASA looking at low-cost ways to use orbital transfer vehicles to deliver spacecraft to hard-to-reach orbits for the space agency.

The awards will support nine studies in all, with a maximum total value of about $1.4 million, NASA said today.

“With the increasing maturity of commercial space delivery capabilities, we’re asking companies to demonstrate how they can meet NASA’s need for multi-spacecraft and multi-orbit delivery to difficult-to-reach orbits beyond current launch service offerings,” Joe Dant, orbital transfer vehicle strategic initiative owner for the Launch Services Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, said in a news release. “This will increase unique science capability and lower the agency’s overall mission costs.”

Blue Origin will conduct two studies — one that focuses on potential NASA applications for its Blue Ring multi-mission space mobility platform, and another that focuses on how the upper stage of its New Glenn rocket could be used.

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