25.03.2022
Blue Origin's upcoming heavy-lift New Glenn rocket will have to wait at least another year for its Florida debut, according to recent comments by an executive later confirmed by the company itself.
Speaking Tuesday during the Satellite 2022 conference in Washington, D.C., Blue Origin's senior vice president of the New Glenn program, Jarrett Jones, said the rocket would not fly from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station before the end of this year as previously planned. Details on a new timeframe were not offered.
A Blue Origin spokesperson later confirmed Jones' comments and said the 322-foot rocket recently completed a design review but will not be ready in time to fly from Launch Complex 36 this year.
"After completing our final design review and getting our agreements with our current customers, it won’t be the end of this year," the spokesperson said. "We’re communicating on a new date with our customers."
The new timeframe being relayed to New Glenn customers was not made available.
"We will fly when we’re ready," the spokesperson said.
The rocket was originally slated to fly in 2020 and then delayed to late 2021. Early last year, Blue said it was pushing to the end of 2022.
New Glenn is the massive rocket Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos sees as the vehicle that will help his company develop a "road to space." Ultimately, Bezos envisions a future in which harmful activities like manufacturing are moved to orbit, leaving Earth as a place to live and less for heavy industry.
The company has spent more than $1 billion on its facility at Launch Complex 36, a pad originally built in the 1960s for Atlas-Centaur rockets. Blue Origin took over in 2015 and has more or less built an entirely new launch complex complete with the tallest water tower in the world.
Blue also operates a massive multi-building rocket factory just outside the main gates of Kennedy Space Center in an area known as Exploration Park. Not only is the New Glenn rocket being built there, but mission control for future missions will be handled out of the main building's top floor.
In the meantime, Blue plans on flying its smaller, tourism-focused New Shepard rocket from its facility in Texas. The company has launched three missions with a total of 14 tourists so far; another flight is planned for no earlier than the morning of Tuesday, March 29, with six more passengers.
Quelle: Florida Today
+++
Vulcan Centaur on schedule for first launch in 2022 as New Glenn slips
WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance remains confident that its Vulcan Centaur rocket will make its first launch this year while Blue Origin is pushing back the first flight of its New Glenn vehicle.
During a panel at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22, Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said that he expected the first launch of the Vulcan “later this year,” but did not offer a more specific schedule.
That schedule is driven by the completion of testing of the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of Vulcan and delivery of the first flight units from Blue Origin. “The engine is in great shape,” Bruno said. “It is performing better than I anticipated.”
Bruno said he expected to receive the first two flight models of the BE-4 in the middle of the year, “which supports me flying before the end of the year.” He added that testing of the engine is also going well, including firing of the engine three times a week “on a sustained basis” at a Blue Origin test site.
Bruno described the ongoing testing of the BE-4 as “pre-qual” testing. “We like to pathfind, so pre-qual does all of that and then more, so that we’re sure it’s going to go smooth” when the formal qualification tests begin. “Pre-qual has been going great.”
“We’re very pleased with where the BE-4 is and we expect to fly this year as a result,” he said.
Jarrett Jones, senior vice president of New Glenn at Blue Origin, said the company had recorded more than 18,000 seconds, or five hours, of BE-4 firings. “We’ve proven it out. We’ve done the gimbaling test for ULA,” he said. “We’re right where we need to be.”
Bruno also firmly closed the door on any consideration of Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine for Vulcan. Doing so would require major changes to the design of Vulcan, as AR1 uses kerosene fuel rather than methane.
“You design your stage and your engine together as a pair. Vulcan is done being designed and it’s being built,” he said. “The BE-4 is nearly complete. It’s running beautifully. I have no interest in changing my partner at this point.”
While Vulcan remains publicly on schedule for a first launch in 2022, Jones ruled out any chance that New Glenn will launch before the end of the year, a schedule that the company had previously cast doubt on. “The runway is closing on 2022,” Jones said.
He said the company is in the process of setting a new date for the first launch and discussing that with customers, but said it was premature to announce it. “It will not be at the end of this year,” he acknowledged.
Blue Origin has completed design reviews and is now in qualification tests of New Glenn, including the booster, forward structure and payload fairing. The fairing is being tested at NASA’s Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, formerly known as Plum Brook Station. “Basically, we are well into qualification of our vehicle, both the upper and the booster stages,” Jones said.
Blue Origin has to balance New Glenn development with completion of the BE-4, which will be used by both New Glenn and Vulcan. “It’s fair to say you’re focusing on your most important customer, delivering BE-4s so I can fly this year,” quipped Bruno.
Quelle: SN