Revived at 22.25 | Today’s start was postponed and later canceled due to unfavorable weather. The next few days could be difficult for Blue Origin, as the US administration limits daily rocket launches due to ongoing budget debates. Until further notice, starting November 10, they can only take off and land at night between 22:00 and 06:00.
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But the regulation applies to commercial flights. It is difficult to judge how New Glenn fits into it organizationally, because the flight was ordered by NASA and is therefore not a classic commercial operation, such as in the case of the launch of Starlink satellites.
If the weather holds out and Cape Canaveral avoids possible technical complications this evening, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, the second heavy rocket carrier in the sequence, will take off no earlier than at 20:45 our time.
An almost hundred-meter high rocket will launch the Escapade mission into space, which will then head to Mars. We devoted more attention to it in a separate article.
Commented live broadcast of the start in Czech:
- What flies: New Glenn Heavy Missile Carrier
- Character of flight: The first stage will attempt to land on the Jacklyn Naval Platform
- Where it flies from: Florida, Mys Canaveral, rampa LC-36
- What time does it fly: November 9, no earlier than 20:45 (window open until 22:13)
- Original broadcast in English: Web mise Escapade/NG-2
Starship’s only western challenger
Table of Contents
The two-stage New Glenn with liquid methane and oxygen engines took off for the first time at the end of this year and promises parameters that come a little closer to the larger Starship Super Heavy duo. It could even be more efficient in the economy of operation, but only real practice will show that – paper can handle a lot.
The nature of today’s flight
Both machines go for it through the load capacity. The launch is still expensive (albeit much cheaper than with carriers of the same class for single use), but when the load is shared by dozens of operators of various cubesats, the price per kilogram will be affordable even for poorer interested parties.
While one Falcon 9 flight will cost $69.85 million (booster retained, 2025 price list) and a sporadic Falcon Heavy flight $97 million (again with boosters retained, 2022), New Glenn could come in at $68 million (Arianespace estimate, 2022).
It can carry 45 tons and, thanks to its width, even the largest one
New Glenn can carry up to 45 tons of material into low orbit. For the geostationary and much more distant one, 13 tons. Tim pockets all the competition with the exception of Starship.
But it still exists only in the form of a test prototype and will only fly on a suborbital trajectory at least once more. New Glenn is complete in this sense, so today NASA will give it their trust.
New Glenn in numbers
Finally, both rockets have one more common denominator. Both the first stage of the Starship, which we call the Super Heavy, and the New Glenn rocket booster are reusable and can land.
In the case of machines from SpaceX, this is a time-tested practice, but Blue Origin will have to prove it.
Huge load capacity
During the first flight, the first stage eventually crashed after successful separation and was unable to land in a controlled manner on the Jacklyn water platform near the coast of Florida.
If it succeeds today, America will be the only one in the world to have the second manufacturer of reusable carriers that actually work for commercial missions.
