For decades\u2014yes, literally decades\u2014it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence.<\/p>\n
But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn<\/em>. It now seems clear that Blue Origin is in the midst of a transition from sleeping giant to force to be reckoned with.<\/p>\n To get a sense of where the company goes from here, Ars spoke with the company\u2019s chief executive, Dave Limp, on the eve of last week\u2019s launch. The first thing he emphasized is how much the company learned about New Glenn, and the process of rolling the vehicle out and standing it up for launch, from the vehicle\u2019s first attempt in January.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been surprised at how smoothly the past 30 days has gone, which is way, way less time than the first flight, and kind of on our nominal schedule,\u201d Limp said. \u201cYou know, there\u2019s little things that have poked their heads up, but it hasn\u2019t been anything that\u2019s really set us back.\u201d<\/p>\n Launch was delayed due to weather and then a solar storm, but when the skies cleared New Glenn lifted off on time, and the vehicle\u2019s first and second stages performed exceptionally well.<\/p>\n Limp said success on New Glenn\u2019s second flight would set the company up for a significant increase in cadence. The company is building enough hardware for \u201cwell above\u201d a dozen flights in 2026, with the upper-end limit of 24 launches. The pacing item is second stages. Right now Blue Origin can build one per month, but the production rate is increasing.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re coming off the line at one a month right now, and then we\u2019re ramping from there,\u201d he said of the second stages, known internally as GS-2. \u201cIt would be ambitious to get to the upper level, but we want to be hardware rich. So, you know, we want to try to keep building as fast as we can, and then with practice I think our launch cadence can go up.\u201d<\/p>\n The biggest part of increasing cadence is manufacturing. That means BE-4 rocket engines for the first stage, BE-3U engines for the upper stage, and the stages themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cWith rockets, it\u2019s hard,\u201d Limp said. \u201cBuilding prototypes is easy but building a machine to make the machines in volume at rate is much harder. And so I do feel like, when I look at the factories, our engine factory in Huntsville, the rocket factory here at Rocket Park and Lunar Plant 1, I feel like when you walk the floor there\u2019s a lot of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n Since he joined Blue Origin about two years ago, Limp said increasing production has been among his foremost goals.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re never done with manufacturing, but I feel on the engine front we\u2019re incredibly strong,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to double the rate again next year. We\u2019ve got work to do, but on second stages I feel like we\u2019re getting there. With the booster, we\u2019re getting there. The key is to be hardware rich, so even if some of these missions have anomalies, we can recover quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n Blue Origin recovered the New Glenn first stage from last week\u2019s flight and brought it into port on Monday. Although it looks much cleaner than a used Falcon 9 first stage, much of this is due to the use of methane propellant, which does not produce the soot that kerosene propellant does. It will take some time to determine if and when this recovered first stage will be able fly again, but if it\u2019s not ready soon Blue Origin has a third first stage nearing completion.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Whichever first stage gets called upon, New Glenn\u2019s next payload is its Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander, a vehicle that is taller than the Apollo Lunar Module that carried humans to the Moon five decades ago.<\/p>\n Limp said the company will soon begin stacking the lunar lander (he promised photos) in Florida. After it is assembled, the lander will be put on a barge and shipped to Johnson Space Center in Houston for testing in a vacuum chamber.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re getting pretty far along,\u201d Limp said of Mark 1. \u201cAs soon as you start putting the gold foil on it, it starts looking like a lunar lander. So I can assure you, it\u2019s coming together. Our plan is to still try to fly that in Q1, so I don\u2019t see anything that\u2019s keeping us from being able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n And after this the goal is to begin flying New Glenn more frequently, to serve a variety of commercial and government customers.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s never been such a high demand for launch as there is right now, even with the cadence that SpaceX is doing,\u201d he said. \u201cSo you know, there\u2019s a lot of customers that are rooting for all launch companies\u2014not just Blue, but all of us\u2014to succeed because there\u2019s a lot of people that are waiting in line to get to space.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For decades\u2014yes, literally decades\u2014it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence. But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn. It now seems clear that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cadence and manufacturing<\/h2>\n
Next stop, the Moon<\/h2>\n