In early September 2016, the founder of the Internet company Amazon Jeff Bezos made an announcement about the start of work on a heavy-class space rocket. The rocket was named New Glenn. It will be developed by Bezos' company Blue Origin, the size of the new launch vehicle should surpass all modern missiles. It is worth noting that Jeff Bezos, founder and head of the Internet company Amazon, is ranked fourth in the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. His fortune is estimated at 66, 2 billion dollars, from which it can already be concluded that his ambitious project will be supported at least from the financial side.
Blue Origin is an American private aerospace company located 40 kilometers north of Van Horn, in Culberson County, Texas. The company was founded in 2000 to develop a new direction - space tourism. It was founded by Jeffrey Bezos, owner and creator of Amazon.com. The company is located on the grounds of his ranch. Plans to build a new, more powerful reusable rocket called New Glenn began talking back in September last year. It is planned to launch it from the US Air Force Launch Complex 36, located at Cape Canaveral. As of September 2016, aerospace company Blue Origin is building a launch pad and hangars at the Air Force Base.
Blue Origin, a private American company, designs and manufactures rockets for space tourism. To date, the company's engineers have only one successful project - a suborbital rocket called the New Shepard. This is a reusable rocket, it is designed to fly slightly above the Karman line (the Karman line is the height above sea level, which is conventionally taken as the boundary between the earth's atmosphere and space), that is, at an altitude of about 100 kilometers above sea level. The first ever successful landing of the New Shepard suborbital rocket occurred in November 2015. Later, the designers of Blue Origin conducted repeated tests of the rocket, including in emergency mode. The New Shepard rocket is a rather "modest" project: the crew capsule, which forms its second module, is designed to accommodate three people.
New Shepard launched in November 2015, photo: blueorigin.com
Although the modest New Shepard tourist suborbital rocket and the only successful space project implemented by Blue Origin, it was she who was the first in the world to demonstrate the possibility of a controlled jet landing on a take-off site, the Washington Post notes. In October 2016, it is planned to conduct the fifth and final test of the prototype of this suborbital rocket - to practice the rescue of its crew members. In January 2016, Blue Origin re-succeeded in the successful vertical landing of the first stage of the reusable New Shepard rocket, after reaching an altitude of 101.7 kilometers in flight. According to the founder of Blue Origin, the launch of the New Shepard suborbital complex with the participation of test pilots is scheduled to begin in 2017. If these tests are successful, then in 2018 the company plans to start sending the first tourists into space, the businessman noted. Until recently, Jeff Bezos did not specify dates for commercial flights using the New Shepard.
In September, The Washington Post, owned by D. Bezos, published comparative sketches of the new New Glenn rocket. From the published images, we can conclude that it is only slightly shorter than the Saturn V launch vehicle (the carrier of the American lunar program), and in terms of the diameter of the first stage (7 meters) it surpasses all modern rockets. A manned space program and delivery of cargoes into orbit are declared as the purpose of the rocket creation; the deadline for testing a new heavy rocket is “the end of the current decade”. “Our main target is the millions of people working and living in space, and the New Glenn rocket is an important step in that direction,” Bezos said.
A new heavy-class launch vehicle called New Glenn, which Blue Origin engineers have been working on for perhaps 4 years, was named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. The diameter of the first stage of the New Glenn rocket is 7 meters, while it is equipped with 7 BE-4 engines that run on liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas. The rocket's lift reaches 3.85 million pounds of thrust (a pound of thrust is the amount of thrust required to keep a 1-pound object (0.454 kg) stationary relative to Earth's gravity).
Photo: blueorigin.com
The New Glenn rocket will be presented in two configurations - with two and three stages, respectively. The height of the two-stage rocket will be 82.2 meters. Its main purpose is the delivery of various cargoes to low-earth orbits. The height of the three-stage version of the rocket is 95.4 meters, which is only slightly inferior to the Saturn-5 launch vehicle, which was used to carry out the first landing of a man on the lunar surface. The three-stage variant of the New Glenn rocket is intended for "critical missions beyond Earth orbits." An additional BE-4 engine will be installed in the second stage of the New Glenn launch vehicle. And the third stage of the rocket will be equipped with a BE-3 engine, which runs on liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, it is noted that hydrogen will give the rocket a high specific impulse, which is important for its use outside the Earth's orbit.
In the first stage of the rocket, as noted above, there should be 7 BE-4 engines of its own design by Blue Origin on cryogenic components (methane - oxygen). The aerospace company calls them the best alternative to the still Soviet rocket engines RD-180 (they are currently equipped with the American Atlas V heavy rocket). The BE-4 engines have not yet passed a series of flight tests, but Blue Origin engineers believe that with these rocket engines, their New Glenn will immediately surpass the Atlas V rocket in the first stage at the ground (about 1700 tf) by 10 times. This is only half the size of the Saturn V rocket that carried American astronauts to the moon.
Currently, another private American company SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, is considered the main competitor of Blue Origin in the field of creating reusable rockets. Its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Israeli AMOS-6 communications satellite, recently exploded during testing at the SLC-40 launch pad located at Cape Canaveral. The official SpaceX tweet stated that the rocket explosion was due to an "anomaly" during a standard test burn. There were no casualties during the explosion of the Falcon 9, but as a result of the explosion, the rocket and cargo were completely destroyed.
Falcon 9 launch vehicle
American billionaire Elon Musk founded SpaceX back in 2002. SpaceX engineers build Falcon rockets. They have previously successfully designed and launched the light Falcon 1 launch vehicle and the medium Falcon 9 launch vehicle. The latter already has a successful flight to the ISS, and SpaceX has also several times managed to land the first stage of this rocket on the ground, as well as on an offshore platform. Currently, SpaceX engineers are working on the creation of a heavy-class launch vehicle that will be able to launch cargo weighing up to 54.4 tons into low-Earth orbit or deliver various cargoes weighing 13.6 tons to Mars.
