KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Blue Origin announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket on Thursday, reducing the cost of manufacturing the vehicle and increasing its ability to deliver payloads to geostationary orbit and the Moon.
With these upgrades, the company aims to eventually enable New Glenn to launch more than 1,000 times per year.
“There has never been more demand for launches,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said at the UP.Summit conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.
Blue Origin has already begun test firing a new engine, called Northstar, which will ultimately replace the BE-4 engine that powers New Glenn’s first stage. Separately, the company also announced that it is developing a hydrogen-oxygen third stage for the GS3 rocket, to give it an extra boost.
A new Northstar
The Northstar engine is a simplified but more powerful version of the BE-4 engine, Limp said. It has half the number of parts, 30% less mass and around 65% can be 3D printed.
Blue Origin estimates it can make the engine at 25% of the cost of a BE-4 engine, and eventually reach the point where each engine can be assembled in less than a day. The company is deeply engaged in the development and testing of Northstar, having already begun a test firing campaign.
“To access space affordably, we need to look at every part of the vehicle,” Limp said. “This is going to be a game changer.”
The BE-4 engine that powers New Glenn today has a thrust of 640,000 pounds, and Limp said Northstar will have a starting thrust of 715,000 pounds. Like the BE-4 engine, Northstar burns methane and liquid oxygen using a staged, oxygen-rich combustion cycle and single-shaft turbopump architecture.
Limp said the company will continue to manufacture the existing BE-4 engine for United Launch Alliance, which uses two of the engines to power its Vulcan rocket.
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