Two new features for New Glenn will reduce production costs and increase payload capacity to Earth orbit and the Moon, with the goal of exceeding 1,000 launches per year.
Blue Origin has announced two major upgrades to its New Glenn rocket that will reduce the vehicle’s manufacturing costs and expand its ability to carry payloads into Earth orbit and the Moon. With these upgrades, the company aims to make New Glenn capable of more than 1,000 launches per year.
“There has never been such a high demand for launches, ever,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, during the conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida. Blue Origin announced it is working on a hydrogen-oxygen third stage for the rocket, called GS3, to give it additional thrust.
Separately, the company has already begun firing tests of a new engine, called Northstar, that will eventually replace the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of the New Glenn rocket.
GS3 provides a nice kick
Blue Origin is developing a third stage for New Glenn, called GS3 (Glenn Stage 3), to offer direct injection into geostationary orbit and Earth escape trajectories. The third stage fits inside an interstage, preserving the entire fairing volume for payloads. The stage can fly both on the smaller 7×2 variant (i.e. with seven engines for the first stage and two for the second) of the New Glenn, and on the larger 9×4 variant. According to Blue Origin, a GS3-equipped New Glenn 7×2 can deliver 8 tons directly to geostationary orbit and 10 tons for translunar injection.
These figures increase to 14 tonnes and 20 tonnes respectively for the larger 9×4 variant. As the rocket’s third stage, it needs to be lightweight, Limp said. For this reason, the third stage is mainly made of composite materials, which are high-performance and lightweight. But there’s a problem…
The hydrogen problem
The stage will be powered by the company’s BE-7 engine, already used in its lunar landers. This engine is optimized for space operations and uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen-based propellants. However, hydrogen is the smallest atom and therefore prone to losses. In composite materials, thermal cycling and mechanical stresses can cause cracks, exacerbating molecular hydrogen losses. Limp said the company wasn’t sure it could build a large composite tank, in this case 5.5 meters in diameter, capable of holding hydrogen at high pressure.
But overcoming all possible obstacles, the company recently achieved a major achievement at launch site number one in Texas, completing the first test of liquid hydrogen storage in a composite tank.
During the test, the tank was pressurized to 100% of the maximum expected pressure during operation for 2.5 hours. It has even been successfully tested at 150% of this maximum pressure for 10 minutes. This gave the company confidence that a GS3 based on composite tanks was a viable concept, and now the company is aiming for a 2028 debut for a government customer.
A new Northstar
“The Northstar engine is a simplified but more powerful version of the BE-4 engine,” Limp said. It has half the components, 30% less mass, and about 65% can be 3D printed. Blue Origin believes it can produce the engine at 25% of the cost of a BE-4 engine and that in the future it can assemble each engine in less than a day. The company is engaged in the development and testing of the Northstar, having already started an ignition test campaign.
“To gain access to space at a lower cost, we need to look at every part of the vehicle,” Limp said. “This will change the cards on the table.” The BE-4 engine currently powering the New Glenn has a thrust of 2.85 million newtons, and Limp said the Northstar will have an initial thrust of 3.18 million newtons. Like the BE-4 engine, the Northstar burns methane and liquid oxygen using an oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle and a single-shaft turbopump architecture. Limp said the company will continue to produce the existing BE-4 engine for United Launch Alliance, which uses two of them to power its Vulcan rocket.
