What Blue Origin is Up To

[Yazata]

They are taking another shot at firing off New Glenn and Escapade today

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/iheyXgtG7EI

[Yazata]

Hold at 20 seconds. They are investigating.

Blue has restarted the clock at T - 30 minutes

New launch time 3:55 PM EST

Good launch

Good stage separation

Good trajectory for both stages

They landed the booster!!

Once in orbit, the second stage successfully performed its second burn to propel the two Escapade spacecraft out to the L-2 Lagrange point where they will loiter until Mars comes into position

Successful deployment of both Escapade spacecraft

Fully successful New Glenn flight 2

This will enable Blue Origin to power ahead with their plans for this rocket. Flight 3 is supposed to be delivering an uncrewed Blue Moon lander to the Moon early 2026, using this recovered flight 2 booster on its second flight.

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[C C]

And indeed, landed a giant booster by means of legs, instead of a catch. Just nice to know the former is possible for big daddies, even if the latter is more spectacular.

[Yazata]

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[Syne]

Wish they had better shots of the landing. Seems a deployed drone wouldn't be asking too much.

[Yazata]

Humans-for-scale photo of the New Glenn booster on its recovery ship.

(Blue Origin photo posted by Jeff Bezos)

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[Syne]

Distant but better view of the whole touchdown:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qWceY13RnbA

Apparently they angled away from the barge until they knew the decent was controlled enough for touchdown.

[Yazata]

Look who's arrived back at Port Canaveral after a little adventure:

No visible damage, it still looks like it's in factory fresh shape. Probably still has that new-booster smell.

New Glenn looks a lot cleaner than the Falcon 9's that return every couple of days. Biggest reason is that methane burns a lot cleaner than kerosine, and produces less soot to blacken the rocket. (Besides, this particular NG has only flown once, not twenty times.)

(Photo by Max Evans for Nasaspaceflight.com)

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[Syne]

Just read that the explosions on the legs during landing were the legs welding themselves to the deck to prevent toppling. Seems larger legs would be a better all-purpose solution.

[Yazata]

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has just informed the company that they are "pausing" their human rated New Shephard suborbital tourist rocket for at least two years, despite it having a healthy number of passengers signed up to fly on it. He says that the reason for the 'pause' is that Blue wants to focus its resources on the much larger New Glenn and on the Blue Moon landers.

I'm just guessing, but perhaps Blue is responding to pressure from Jared and NASA to speed up human lunar spaceflight progress.

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