Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday unveiled new details about the company’s New Glenn orbital rocket, including a two stage and three stage variant and capability of taking 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) and 45 metric tons to low earth orbit (LEO).
During a keynote at the Satellite 2017 conference in Washington, Bezos said the reusable booster stage, the BE-4 liquefied natural gas engine (LNG), is designed for operable use with a 100 flight lifespan. The streaks on the rocket, he said, are aerodynamic surfaces that allow the rocket to operate with very high availability in very high wind conditions. Bezos said this is because New Glenn needs to be able to fly through a wide variety of wind environments as the company doesn’t want to constrain availability of launch based on availability of landing the booster.
Bezos said Blue Origin put a lot of work into letting the rocket fly back with aerodynamic surface control instead of with propulsion to allow lots of cross range. This, he said, allows the booster to get back to the landing ship. The company will land New Glenn on a floating landing pad-type ship similar to the one that has been used by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) and its Falcon 9.
New Glenn, Bezos said, is designed without the need for an in-space deceleration burn, which he said is a performance and efficiency improvement. Not having to do a deceleration burn saves on propellant, he said. New Glenn will feature six landing gear legs and the BE-4 will feature a blue plume, which Bezos attributed to the liquefied natural gas propellant.
Bezos said the landing ship will use fin stabilizers to level itself, which he said will create high landing availability even in heavy seas. French satellite operator Eutelsat will be New Glenn’s first customer. Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer said the company has been a first company on three other rockets—Atlas, Delta and Ariane. New Glenn is expected to debut in 2020, according to Eutelsat. The Eutelsat agreement with Blue Origin covers the launch of a geostationary satellite in the 2021-2022 timeframe.
Blue Origin went with vertical landing because of its ability to scale well. Bezos said there are three ways to land a big booster: wings like on the space shuttle; parachutes, which he said hasn’t been done, but could be done; and vertical landing. Bezos said vertical landing is the inverted pendulum problem, where one can balance a broom in the palm of his or her hand, he said, but its very difficult to balance a pencil in the palm of someone’s hand because the pencil has very low moment of inertia.
This is why Bezos said it will be easier for Blue Origin to land New Glenn as opposed to landing its smaller New Shepard space tourism vehicle. Bezos said as the vehicles gets bigger, the inverted pendulum problem gets a little easier to solve.
Blue Origin’s ultimate goal is to dramatically lower launch costs, which Bezos said is largely driven by hardware. He said launch costs are also driven by the non-recurring engineering of designing the vehicle and the cost of throwing the hardware away, technically known as expending the booster. Propellant costs are “vanishingly” small, he said, at less than $1 million, especially if it is a hydro carbon launch vehicle.
“There’s a lot of opportunity over time to dramatically shrink costs, and reusability is 8-of-10 points to dramatically shrink costs,” Bezos said.
Bezos said previous attempts at true operational reusability failed because it wasn’t operational reusability, which he called a key difference. There was too much inspection, maintenance and validation of the vehicle that had to be done. The goal, Bezos said, is to make launch more like commercial airliners, which don’t throw away the aircraft at the end of the trip.
Similarity, Bezos said if they disassemble the commercial airliner after it lands at its destination and x-ray and inspect every part, it’s going to be a very expensive trip. If Blue Origin, he said, can get to true operational reusability by cutting out all that inspection, maintenance and validation, then launch costs can be dramatically lowered. He said Blue Origin has achieved true operational reusability on New Shepard.
Satellite 2017 is produced by Defense Daily parent company Access Intelligence.