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.
