Enlarge/ One of the most historic rockets in SpaceX’s fleet toppled over Christmas Day on the return trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, following its previous mission.
The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX’s first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida.
This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX’s fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history on several counts.
It was the first time a commercial rocket and spacecraft launched people into orbit, and ended a nine-year gap in America’s ability to send astronauts into orbit from US soil, following the retirement of the space shuttle. This mission, known as Demo-2 and launched by SpaceX under contract with NASA, ended US reliance on Russian rockets to send crews to the International Space Station.
SpaceX recovered the booster on one of its offshore landing platforms after the historic launch in May 2020, while the Falcon 9’s upper stage fired into orbit with the Crew Dragon spacecraft containing Hurley and Behnken. Then, the rocket went into SpaceX’s fleet rotation to launch 18 more times, primarily on missions to deploy Starlink Internet satellites.
Hurley, who commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission, kept up with the booster’s exploits well after his return to Earth. He regularly exchanged text messages with Behnken and Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, as the rocket just kept flying.
“For Bob and I, that particular booster was always pretty special for a lot of reasons,” said Hurley, a veteran Marine Corps fighter pilot who retired from NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021. He now works at Northrop Grumman.
An inauspicious ending
Hurley told Ars he would like to see the booster’s remains displayed in a museum alongside the Crew Dragon spacecraft (named Endeavour) he and Behnken flew in 2020. “In a perfect world, I’d love to see Endeavour and at least now part of that booster in the Smithsonian or in a museum somewhere,” he said.
“It’s kind of a bummer,” Hurley told Ars. But he understands SpaceX got a lot of use out of this rocket. SpaceX also has a lot of love for Hurley and Behnken. The company named two of its recovery ships for payload fairings “Bob” and “Doug” after the astronaut duo.
“SpaceX has got a business to run,” he said. “I think, at this point, certainly Endeavour is going to fly more, but this booster isn’t, so hopefully they can find a spot to display it somewhere. Even part of it would look kind of cool somewhere. They could figure something out … People, I think, can get a lot of inspiration from seeing stuff that’s actually flown in space, and being able to get right up close to it, I think, is a big deal to a lot of people.”
Enlarge/ Doug Hurley, right, commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission in 2020.
NASA
The 19th launch of this booster on December 23 was just as successful as the previous 18, with a smooth climb into space before shutting down its nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines. The booster coasted to the highest point in its trajectory—72 miles (116 kilometers)—before Earth’s gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere.
Two engine burns slowed the rocket as it descended toward SpaceX’s drone ship positioned near the Bahamas, and then four carbon-fiber legs deployed moments before an on-target touchdown. Then, as usual, the recovery vessel started its slow journey back to Florida with the 15-story-tall booster standing vertically.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.
On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military’s X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 8: 07 pm EST (01: 07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11: 01 pm EST (04: 01 UTC), SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.
The Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters and the Falcon 9’s first stage landed back on Earth for reuse.
These were SpaceX’s final launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, set a goal of 100 launches this year, up from the company’s previous record of 61 in 2022. For a while, it looked like SpaceX was on track to accomplish the feat, but a spate of bad weather and technical problems with the final Falcon Heavy launch of the year kept the company short of 100 flights.
King of ‘upmass’
“Congrats to the entire Falcon team at SpaceX on a record breaking 96 launches in 2023!” wrote Jon Edwards, vice president of Falcon launch vehicles at SpaceX, on the social media platform X. “I remember when Elon Musk first threw out a goal of 100 launches as a thought experiment, intended to unlock our thinking as to how we might accelerate Falcon across all levels of production and launch.
“Only a few years later and here we are,” Edwards wrote. “I’m so incredibly proud to work with the best team on Earth, and so excited to see what we achieve next year.”
It’s important to step back and put these numbers in context. No other family of orbit-class rockets has ever flown more than 63 times in a year. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now exceeded this number by roughly 50 percent. SpaceX’s competitors in the United States, such as United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab, managed far fewer flights in 2023. ULA had three missions, and Rocket Lab launched its small Electron booster 10 times.
Nearly two-thirds of SpaceX’s missions this year were dedicated to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, a constellation that now numbers more than 5,000 spacecraft.
SpaceX also launched five missions with the Falcon Heavy rocket, created by aggregating three Falcon 9 rocket boosters together. Highlights from SpaceX’s 2023 Falcon launch schedule included three crew missions to the International Space Station, and the launch of NASA’s Psyche mission to explore a metallic asteroid.
In all, SpaceX’s Falcon rockets hauled approximately 1,200 metric tons, or more than 2.6 million pounds, of payload mass into orbit this year. This “upmass” is equivalent to nearly three International Space Stations. Most of this was made up of mass-produced Starlink satellites.
Enlarge/ Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster comes in for landing in West Texas at the conclusion of Tuesday’s suborbital flight.
Blue Origin
With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments.
This was the first flight of Blue Origin’s 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle’s pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.
The flight on Tuesday also didn’t carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday’s launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions.
Blue Origin’s capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company’s nonprofit.
For Tuesday’s return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin’s remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10: 42 am CST (16: 42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers).
The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin’s capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight.
Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.
“A special thank you to all of our customers who flew important science today and the students who contributed postcards to advance our future of living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,” said Phil Joyce, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for the New Shepard program, in a statement. “Demand for New Shepard flights continues to grow and we’re looking forward to increasing our flight cadence in 2024.”
Blue Origin will fly people again “soon”
It took 15 months for Blue Origin to return to flight with New Shepard, but Tuesday’s successful launch puts the company on a path to resuming human missions. Most of Blue Origin’s customers for these suborbital flights have been wealthy individuals or special guests invited to strap in for a ride to space. Blue Origin’s passengers have included Bezos, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and actor William Shatner, eager for a taste of spaceflight. New Shepard passengers experience a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth.
Blue Origin hasn’t disclosed its ticket price, but seats on a New Shepard flight last year reportedly sold for $1.25 million. This is more than double the price for a seat on Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceship.
So when will Blue Origin start flying people again? “Following a thorough review of today’s mission, we look forward to flying our next crewed flight soon,” said Erika Wagner, a longtime Blue Origin manager who co-hosted the company’s webcast of Tuesday’s flight.
But “soon” is a conveniently vague term. In March, when Blue Origin announced the results of its investigation into last year’s launch failure, the company said it would return to flight “soon” with New Shepard. Nine months later, New Shepard finally flew again.
Engineers probing the New Shepard accident last year concluded a nozzle failure on the rocket’s BE-3PM was the direct cause of the launch failure. The engine operated at higher temperatures than expected, leading to thermal damage to the nozzle, Blue Origin announced earlier this year.
Blue Origin said corrective actions to address the cause of the failure included design changes to the engine combustion chamber and adjustments to operating parameters. These changes were expected to reduce operating temperatures. Engineers also redesigned parts of the nozzle to help it better handle thermal and dynamic loads, the company said.
In September, the Federal Aviation closed its investigation into the New Shepard launch failure, and Blue Origin targeted an uncrewed return-to-flight mission in early October. However, Ars previously reported that an additional two-month delay was caused by an issue with certifying an engine part intended for flight.
The long-term grounding of the New Shepard rocket caused speculation about the program’s future, particularly at a time when Blue Origin is ramping up preparations for the inaugural flight of the much larger orbital-class New Glenn launcher. Last year’s launch failure left Blue Origin with just one New Shepard booster in its inventory—the rocket that made its ninth flight to space on Tuesday.
This particular booster has been exclusively used for uncrewed research missions. Blue Origin hasn’t confirmed whether it has another New Shepard rocket in production for human flights.
But statements from Blue Origin officials Tuesday suggest New Shepard has a future. Wagner said Blue Origin aims to open New Shepard missions to researchers on future flights, allowing scientists to directly work with their experiments in microgravity.
Enlarge/ A Long March 5 rocket, the largest launcher in China’s inventory, deployed a classified Chinese military satellite into orbit Friday.
China’s largest rocket apparently wasn’t big enough to launch the country’s newest spy satellite, so engineers gave the rocket an upgrade.
The Long March 5 launcher flew with a payload fairing some 20 feet (6.2 meters) taller than its usual nose cone when it took off on Friday with a Chinese military spy satellite. This made the Long March 5, with a height of some 200 feet, the tallest rocket China has ever flown.
Adding to the intrigue, the Chinese government claimed the spacecraft aboard the Long March 5 rocket, named Yaogan-41, is a high-altitude optical remote sensing satellite. These types of surveillance satellites usually fly much closer to Earth to obtain the sharpest images possible of an adversary’s military forces and strategically important sites.
This could mean a few things. First, assuming China’s official description is accurate, the satellite could be heading for a perch in geosynchronous orbit, a position that would afford any Earth-facing sensors continuous views of a third of the world’s surface. In this orbit, the spacecraft would circle Earth once every 24 hours, synchronizing its movement with the planet’s rotation.
Because this mission launched on China’s most powerful rocket, with the longer payload fairing added on, the Yaogan-41 spacecraft is presumably quite big. The US military’s space tracking network found the Yaogan-41 satellite in an elliptical, or oval-shaped, soon after Friday’s launch. Yaogan-41’s trajectory takes it between an altitude of about 121 miles (195 kilometers) and 22,254 miles (35,815 kilometers), according to publicly available tracking data.
This is a standard orbit for spacecraft heading into geosynchronous orbit. It’s likely in the coming weeks that the Yaogan-41 satellite will maneuver into this more circular orbit, where it would maintain an altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) and perhaps nudge itself into an orbit closer to the equator.
Staring down from space
In an official statement, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency claimed Yaogan-41 will be used for civilian purposes, such as land surveys and agricultural monitoring. In reality, China uses the Yaogan name as a blanket identifier for most of its military satellites.
US military officials will closely watch to see where Yaogan-41 ends up. If it settles into geosynchronous orbit over the Indian or Pacific Oceans, as analysts expect, Yaogan-41 would have a constant view of China, Taiwan, and neighboring countries.
From such a high altitude, Yaogan-41’s optical imager won’t have the sharp vision of a satellite closer to Earth. But it’s easy to imagine the benefits of all-day coverage, even at lower resolution, without China’s military needing to wait hours for a follow-up pass over a potential target from another satellite in low-Earth orbit.
In August, China launched a synthetic aperture radar surveillance satellite into a geosynchronous-type orbit using a medium-lift Long March 7 rocket. This spacecraft can achieve 20-meter (66-foot) resolution at Earth’s surface with its radar instrument, which is capable of day-and-night all-weather imaging.
Optical payloads, like the one on Yaogan-41, are restricted to daytime observations over cloud-free regions. China launched a smaller optical remote sensing satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2015, ostensibly for civilian purposes.
Although Chinese officials did not disclose the exact capabilities of Yaogan-41, it would almost certainly have the sensitivity to continually track US Navy ships and allied vessels across a wide swath of the Indo-Pacific. Aside from its use of the larger payload fairing, the Long March 5 rocket used to launch Yaogan-41 can haul approximately 31,000 pounds (14 metric tons) of payload mass into the orbit it reached on Friday’s launch.
This suggests China could have equipped Yaogan-41 with a large telescope to stare down from space. Notably, China acknowledged Yaogan-41’s purpose as an optical imaging satellite. China’s government doesn’t always do that. Perhaps this is a signal to US officials.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is seen outside the company’s hangar at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
SpaceX
SpaceX and the US Space Force thought they were ready to launch the military’s mysterious X-37B spaceplane this week, but ground teams in Florida need to roll the Falcon Heavy rocket back into its hangar for servicing.
This is expected to push back the launch until at least late December, perhaps longer. SpaceX and Space Force officials have not divulged details about the problems causing the delay.
SpaceX called off a launch attempt Monday night at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to resolve a problem with a ground system. A senior Space Force official told Ars on Wednesday that additional issues will cause an additional delay in the launch.
“We’re working through a couple of technical glitches with our SpaceX team that just are going to take a little bit more time to work through,” said Col. James Horne, deputy director of the Space Force’s Assured Access to Space directorate. “We haven’t nailed down a specific launch date yet, but we’re going to have to roll back into the HIF (Horizontal Integration Facility) and work through some things on the rocket.”
Horne, a senior leader on the Space Force team overseeing military launches like this one, said the ground equipment problem that prevented liftoff Monday night could be fixed as soon as Wednesday. But it will take longer to resolve other issues he declined to specify. “We found some things that we need to run some analysis on, so that’s what’s driving the delay,” he said.
SpaceX was similarly vague in its explanation for the delay. In a post on the social media platform X, SpaceX said the company was standing down from the launch this week to “perform additional system checkouts.”
There’s a chance the Falcon Heavy might be back on the launch pad by the end of December or early next year. A SpaceX recovery vessel that was on station for the Falcon Heavy launch in the Atlantic Ocean is returning to shore, suggesting the launch won’t happen anytime soon.
“We’ve got to look at the schedule and balance that with all the other challenges,” Horne said. “But I hope we can get it off before the end of the year.”
Lunar launch date in jeopardy
When it’s ready to fly, the Falcon Heavy launch with the military’s X-37B spaceplane will likely get high priority on SpaceX’s launch schedule. The military’s launch ranges, like the one at Cape Canaveral, are primarily there to serve national security requirements, even though they get a lot more use from commercial space missions.
Depending on how long it’s delayed, this military launch could affect several SpaceX missions currently scheduled to fly in January. Most notably, a Falcon 9 rocket is slated to lift off from the same launch pad in January with the first commercial Moon lander from Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company contracted to deliver scientific payloads to the lunar surface for NASA.
This robotic mission is one of the first two US-built spacecraft to attempt a Moon landing since the last Apollo landing in 1972. The Intuitive Machines mission, named IM-1, is scheduled to launch during a narrow window from January 12–16.
A few days earlier, as soon as January 8, another commercial lunar lander from Astrobotic is scheduled for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on the first test flight of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket. The Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines missions can only launch a few days each month due to limitations imposed by orbital mechanics and lighting conditions at their landing sites. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander was previously supposed to launch on December 24, but ULA pushed back the launch to perform more testing on the Vulcan rocket.
The landers from Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are both at Cape Canaveral, waiting for their turn in the Florida spaceport’s busy launch manifest.
The IM-1 mission has to depart Earth from Launch Complex 39A, the same site previously used by the Saturn V rocket and space shuttle. SpaceX has outfitted the pad to top off the Intuitive Machines lander with cryogenic propellant just before launch, a capability unavailable at SpaceX’s other launch pad in Florida. Likewise, LC-39A is the only launch pad capable of supporting Falcon Heavy missions.
It usually takes a couple of weeks to reconfigure LC-39A between Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 launches. The Falcon Heavy is significantly more powerful, with three Falcon 9 first-stage boosters connected together to haul more massive payloads into orbit.
A private astronaut mission managed by Axiom Space is also in the mix, with a launch date set for January 9. This mission, known as Ax-3, will carry four commercial astronauts aboard a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft on a roughly two-week flight to the International Space Station. Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said the company hasn’t decided which pad Ax-3 will launch from.
All of SpaceX’s crew missions to date have lifted off from LC-39A, but the company recently constructed a crew access tower and arm to enable astronaut flights to depart from nearby Space Launch Complex 40. This gives SpaceX some flexibility to alleviate launch bottlenecks at LC-39A, which is required for some of the company’s most important missions.
LC-39A will remain the primary launch pad for SpaceX’s crew missions, Walker said Wednesday, but she added: “Having the second pad available enables us to be ultra-responsive to customer needs and growing demand by moving a Dragon over to SLC-40 when the need arises.”
It’s a good problem to have so many interesting payloads vying for a launch slot with SpaceX, but the tyranny of physics and infrastructure constraints could mean one of these missions might have to wait a little longer for a ride to space.
Enlarge/ This picture, taken several months ago, shows different parts for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket inside the company’s manufacturing facility in Florida.
Blue Origin
For the first time, it’s starting to feel like Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, might have a shot at launching its long-delayed New Glenn rocket within the next 12 months.
Of course, there’s a lot for Blue Origin to test and validate before New Glenn is ready to fly. First, the company’s engineers need to fully assemble a New Glenn rocket and raise it on the company’s sprawling seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There’s a good chance of this happening in the coming months as Blue Origin readies for a series of tanking tests and simulated countdowns at the launch site.
It’s tempting to invoke Berger’s Law, the guideline championed by my Ars colleague which states that if a launch is scheduled for the fourth quarter of a calendar year—and if it is at least six months away—the launch will delay into the next year. Given Blue Origin’s history of New Glenn delays, that’s probably the safer bet. New Glenn’s inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for 2024.
But it’s worth noting that Blue Origin has been consistent in its 2024 launch schedule for New Glenn for a while now, and on Tuesday, a senior Blue Origin official doubled down on this goal for the debut of New Glenn. There are also several signs beyond statements from Blue Origin that the company is making real progress with its new rocket.
The two-stage New Glenn will stand more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, with the capability to haul nearly 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of payload into low-Earth orbit, according to Blue Origin. This is a weight class above the uppermost capability of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket but below SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
A NASA official last month said the agency anticipates putting one of its robotic Mars missions on the first flight of Blue Origin’s new rocket next year. The Mars science mission, named ESCAPADE, consists of two small identical spacecraft to study the Martian magnetosphere. It is relatively low in cost, and NASA is willing to accept some risk in launching it on the first New Glenn flight, but if it doesn’t depart Earth next year, the mission faces a two-year delay.
Lars Hoffman, Blue Origin’s vice president of government sales, gave a high-level overview of the privately-developed New Glenn rocket during a presentation Tuesday to the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in Orlando.
“We’re now ready to really start amping things up a bit,” Hoffman said. “We’ll start launching New Glenn next year.”
What to watch for in 2024
Hoffman showed a video inside Blue Origin’s New Glenn manufacturing plant near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a few miles away from the launch site at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin intends to use most of the parts visible inside, which included tanks and other metallic structures, on real flightworthy New Glenn rockets, he said. Some of the equipment will be used for qualification testing on the ground.
“The manufacturing pace is just picking up by the day,” Hoffman told the gathering of Space Force officials. “This is all flight hardware that we’re going to fly on our first launches next year. There’s some qual hardware in there as well, but things are picking up very fast. In fact, we’re expanding the buildings there to support that scaling.”
In the last few weeks, photographers have caught glimpses of New Glenn’s payload fairing traveling on a transporter down a road near Cape Canaveral. The clamshell-like fairing has a diameter of 23 feet (7 meters) and a height of more than 70 feet (21.9 meters), with roughly twice the volume as a typical payload shroud flown on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket, according to Hoffman.
The fairing is now inside Blue Origin’s hangar near the New Glenn launch pad, Hoffman said. A large section of a New Glenn first stage booster, complete with Blue Origin livery, was also spotted just outside the manufacturing complex in Florida. When asked by Ars on Tuesday, Hoffman declined to confirm if this booster is slated for the first New Glenn flight, or if it is a ground test unit, but he said most of what Blue Origin has shown inside the factory is flight hardware.
“With our launch site right next door, it makes it very easy for us to build the rocket, transport it right to the launch site at our integration facility, with payload processing right nearby, all of it right there together,” Hoffman said.
Construction at the New Glenn launch pad, located on a site once used to launch Atlas rockets, is now complete, according to Hoffman. The pad is one of the largest launch sites at the Florida spaceport. “It is just ready to go, and we’ll put it to good use starting next year.”
Enlarge/ An artist’s rendering of a New Glenn rocket in flight.
Over the next few months, Hoffman said Blue Origin plans to ramp up engine testing ahead of the debut launch of New Glenn. This will include firings of the methane-fueled BE-4 engine and the hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engine on a test stand in Alabama. Seven BE-4s will power the first stage of New Glenn, and two BE-3Us will be on the second stage.
Similar versions of both of these engines will be flight-proven by the time New Glenn finally takes off. The BE-3U is a different variant of the BE-3 engine used on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket, and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket will use two BE-4 engines from Blue Origin on each of its first stage boosters.
One of the most significant milestones leading up to the debut of New Glenn will be out of Blue Origin’s hands. Hoffman identified the first launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket with its BE-4 engines, now planned for January, as one of the key events in the run-up to the maiden flight of New Glenn.
Hoffman didn’t provide a specific timeline, but he told Ars that Blue Origin’s gound teams in Florida are preparing to raise a New Glenn rocket vertical on its launch pad for a series of cryogenic propellant loading tests. These tests, sometimes called “wet dress rehearsals,” will include filling the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen propellants. Recent history with other new rockets suggests minor problems can stretch out these tests for months.
Two Blue Origin officials told Ars that the company is not currently planning to perform a full-scale test-firing of an entire New Glenn booster, with all seven of its BE-4 engines, before the inaugural launch. If this holds, it would be unusual. These hotfire tests are a standard part of preparing of the first flight of a new rocket. Just this year, we’ve seen ULA test-fire its Vulcan booster, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket go through multiple hotfire tests, and SpaceX’s enormous Super Heavy booster fire up its engines on the launch pad.
Blue Origin does plan to test-fire New Glenn’s second stage before the inaugural launch, the officials said.
Hoffman didn’t narrow down the schedule for the first flight of New Glenn beyond some time next year, but NASA’s ESCAPADE mission tentatively slated to fly on it is on contract for a launch date in August 2024. However, this schedule is under review, according to Laura Aguiar, a NASA spokesperson.
The official launch schedule in August would have the New Glenn rocket place the two ESCAPADE probes into an orbit around Earth, leaving the spacecraft themselves to perform the final maneuvers to escape Earth’s gravity and fly to Mars. Aguiar told Ars there are other options available, including using the ample lift capability of New Glenn to send the twin probes directly to Mars on a trajectory known as a Hohmann transfer, allowing for a launch date later next year.
“The NASA team, in conjunction with our spacecraft and rocket partners, are constantly evaluating alternative trajectory profiles that optimize the availability and flexibility of our launch opportunities,” Aguiar said in a written statement. “Some of these alternatives involve a more traditional (Hohmann) planetary transfer, which allows for launch availability further into 2024.”
Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2000, now has approximately 11,000 employees, primarily at locations in suburban Seattle, West Texas, Huntsville, Alabama, and Cape Canaveral. Although it has never launched anything into orbit, Blue Origin is one of two companies competing in the suborbital space tourism and research market, alongside Virgin Galactic. Blue Origin has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop a human-rated Moon lander to carry astronauts to the lunar surface on one of the agency’s Artemis missions.
Blue Origin also wants to join ULA and SpaceX in launching the US military’s most critical national security space missions. And Amazon, where Bezos made his fortune, wants to launch a large number of its Kuiper Internet satellites on Blue Origin rockets.
A new chief executive, Dave Limp, will take the reins at Blue Origin this month from Bob Smith, who oversaw a period of vast growth in employee headcount. Despite this, the company fell further behind its main competitor, SpaceX.
The orbital-class New Glenn is a centerpiece of making Bezos’s space ambitions a reality. Its first stage is designed to be reusable from the start to reduce launch costs and improve launch cadence. Hoffman said Blue Origin aims to recover the booster on a floating offshore platform beginning with the first flight. Blue Origin recently delivered a large fixture to Port Canaveral, Florida, to help rotate landed New Glenn boosters from a vertical to a horizontal position after returning to shore.
Blue Origin eventually intends to recover and reuse the entire rocket. “We are on a path to full reusability in the long term, and that’s the goal,” Hoffman said.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket stands on Launch Complex 39A in Florida, hours before its scheduled liftoff with the military’s X-37B spaceplane.
Trevor Mahlmann/Ars Technica
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is poised for launch as soon as Tuesday night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the US military’s mysterious X-37B spaceplane is fastened atop the heavy-lifter for a ride into orbit.
Although the Space Force is keeping details about the military spaceplane’s flight under wraps, we know it’s heading into an unusual orbit, probably significantly higher than the X-37B’s previous sojourns that stayed within a few hundred miles of Earth’s surface.
SpaceX’s launch team called off a launch attempt Monday night “due to a ground side issue” and reset for another launch opportunity as soon as Tuesday night at 8: 14pm EST (01: 14 UTC). When it lifts off, the Falcon Heavy will light 27 kerosene-fueled engines to power the rocket off its launch pad overlooking the Atlantic coastline.
The exact altitude the X-37B will be flying through is unclear, but hobbyists and amateur sleuths who use open source information to reconstruct trajectories of top-secret military spacecraft suggest the Falcon Heavy will haul the winged vehicle into an orbit that could stretch tens of thousands of miles above the planet.
What’s more, the Falcon Heavy will apparently take a flight path toward the northeast from Florida’s Space Coast, then ultimately release the X-37B on a trajectory that will take it over Earth’s polar regions. This is a significant departure from the flight profile for the military spaceplane’s six previous missions, which all flew to space on smaller rockets than the Falcon Heavy.
In a statement, the Space Force said this flight of the X-37B is focused on “a wide range of test and experimentation objectives.” Flying in “new orbital regimes” is among the test objectives, military officials said.
“It seems to me like it might be a much higher orbit that it’s going to,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation, which promotes sustainable and peaceful uses of outer space. “Otherwise, I don’t know why they would use a Falcon Heavy, which is a pretty big thing.”
Covering more ground
The X-37B spaceplane has attracted a lot of attention and speculation since its first mission in 2010. Across multiple administrations, Pentagon officials have consistently walked a narrow line between acknowledging the existence of the spaceplane, and divulging limited information about its general purpose, while treating some details with the utmost secrecy. The military does not talk about where in space it flies. With a few exceptions, defense officials haven’t publicly discussed specifics of what the X-37B carries into orbit.
The military has two Boeing-built X-37B spaceplanes, or Orbital Test Vehicles, in its inventory. They are reusable and designed to launch inside the payload fairing of a conventional rocket, spend multiple years in space with the use of solar power, and then return to Earth for a landing on a three-mile-long runway, either at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California or at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It resembles a miniature version of NASA’s retired space shuttle orbiter, with wings, deployable landing gear, and black thermal protection tiles to shield its belly from the scorching heat of reentry. It measures 29 feet (about 9 meters) long, roughly a quarter of the length of NASA’s space shuttle, and it doesn’t carry astronauts. The X-37B has a cargo bay inside the fuselage for payloads, with doors that open after launch and close before landing.
The Space Force made a surprise announcement on November 8 that the next flight of the X-37B, sometimes called OTV-7, would launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. All six of the spaceplane’s past flights launched on smaller rockets, either United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V or SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
