Blue Origin stacks huge New Glenn rocket ahead of 1st launch (photo)

a huge white rocket sits on its side in a hangar
The two stages of Blue Origin's huge New Glenn rocket in the company's facility near Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: Blue Origin via X)

Blue Origin's massive new rocket is getting closer to being ready to fly.

The company shared a new photo of the two stages of its New Glenn rocket being joined together for the first time in the company's facility near NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. "GS-1 meets GS-2," the company wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in a post accompanying the photo, in reference to the first (GS-1) and second (GS-2) stages of the new rocket.

New Glenn is expected to make its maiden flight sometime in November, taking off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to KSC. The flight will carry one of the company's new Blue Ring spacecraft on a National Security Space Launch certification flight known as DarkSky-1 and sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit. 

New Glenn features a reusable first-stage booster. The new rocket stands 270 feet (82 meters) tall in its two-stage version and 313 feet (95 m) tall in its three-stage version. SpaceX's Falcon 9, by comparison, stands between 209 feet (63.7 m) and 230 feet (70 m) tall, depending on its payload. 

Blue Ring is a spacecraft platform, meaning it can serve as a bus, or service module, for other spacecraft that can either be deployed into orbit or remain attached, as in the scheduled first flight. Blue Origin touts the vehicle's maneuverability, writing in a company statement that Blue Ring has unprecedented capabilities "to easily maneuver through multiple orbits."

Related: New Glenn: Blue Origin's reusable rocket

An illustration of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft platform in orbit above Earth.  (Image credit: Blue Origin)

The Blue Ring platform is being marketed to both commercial and government customers and has data storage and data processing capabilities.

The next step in Blue Origin's testing and development of New Glenn will be a static hot fire test, in which the seven BE-4 engines on the rocket's first stage are ignited for several seconds. 

The rocket was scheduled to take off on its first mission in October 2024 to launch NASA's twin ESCAPADE Mars probes, but the space agency decided to stand down from that launch to avoid potential cost overruns related to the rocket's development.

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Brett Tingley
Managing Editor, Space.com

Brett is curious about emerging aerospace technologies, alternative launch concepts, military space developments and uncrewed aircraft systems. Brett's work has appeared on Scientific American, The War Zone, Popular Science, the History Channel, Science Discovery and more. Brett has English degrees from Clemson University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In his free time, Brett enjoys skywatching throughout the dark skies of the Appalachian mountains.

  • danR
    As hard as they have tried, New Glenn will still put less mass into LEO than SpaceX' old Falcon Heavy, with respect to full reusability.
    Reply
  • Ryan F. Mercer
    danR said:
    As hard as they have tried, New Glenn will still put less mass into LEO than SpaceX' old Falcon Heavy, with respect to full reusability.
    I don't believe the Falcon Heavy center stage or second stage are reusable in that configuration. The second stage isn't reusable in any configuration.
    Reply