Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, shown here in an illustration, is a 310-foot reusable booster that isn’t expected to make its first flight until 2021.
Photo: Blue Origin/Reuters
The space transportation company run by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos reached another important steppingstone in its effort to become an established launcher of U.S. civilian and national-security payloads.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Wednesday named Blue Origin Federation LLC’s New Glenn rocket—a 310-foot reusable booster that isn’t expected to make its first flight until 2021—as one of its potential launch providers for scientific missions later in the decade.
The agency said no specific contracts had been awarded to Blue Origin, but the announcement for the first time makes the closely held company eligible for such NASA business. Under the arrangement, the company Mr. Bezos founded nearly two decades ago will be allowed to use New Glenn, roughly six stories taller than rival rockets, to compete for awards. Various NASA centers will be able to design spacecraft to take advantage of New Glenn’s power and other features, including its capability to transport larger payload volumes than other rockets.
In a statement, Blue Origin said: “We are proud to be in NASA’s launch services catalog and look forward to providing reliable launches” for NASA for years to come.
Other heavy-lift rockets already cleared to compete for NASA’s scientific launches include those operated by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Until the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin.
Photo: mike blake/Reuters
New Glenn, which is receiving development funding from the Pentagon, also is in the running for national-security launches. And Blue Origin previously signed up a number of commercial-satellite operators as customers.
Until the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin by avoiding publicity, personally investing roughly $1 billion in the company in some years while declining to discuss test launches of its smaller New Shepard booster before its first blastoff in 2015.
In addition to transporting satellites, Blue Origin has been testing hardware to take space tourists on suborbital thrill rides.
But as the company grew and the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture agreed to buy Blue Origin engines to help power its next-generation booster targeting Pentagon contracts, Mr. Bezos and his team opened up about their plans.
In a 2019 interview, Chief Executive Bob Smith said the company’s strategy relied heavily on winning lucrative military and other government business for its mega-rocket. “We need those customers,” he said.
Since then, Blue Origin has successfully bid to become one of three teams devising lunar landers intended to transport NASA astronauts.
Blue Origin has constructed a sprawling assembly facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of New Glenn boosters. Representing what people in the industry have estimated amounts to a $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn is designed to lift up to 45 tons into low-earth orbit—a third more tonnage than SpaceX’s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy.
Write to Andy Pasztor at [email protected]
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Appeared in the December 17, 2020, print edition as ‘NASA Gives OK To Bezos Rocket.’
