Tales of two rocketsby Jeff Foust
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| “Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space,” Jones said after the launch. |
By then, though, delays had affected plans for the rocket’s inaugural launch, called NG-1 by the company. In 2023, NASA announced it selected New Glenn for the launch of ESCAPADE, a mission that will send a pair of smallsats to Mars to study the interaction of the solar wind with the planet. By early September, though, NASA concluded that New Glenn would not be ready before the launch window for ESCAPADE closed in mid-October, halting spacecraft preparations for the launch.
Blue Origin then turned internally to find a payload for the NG-1 launch. It announced it would fly Blue Ring Pathfinder, a technology demonstration payload for its Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle the company is developing. It would remain attached to the upper stage for the duration of its mission, slated to last about six hours once it reached orbit—assuming, of course, the launch was a success.
The company said at the time of the NASA decision on ESCAPADE that it would still attempt to launch New Glenn before the end of 2024. However, preparations dragged on, and it wasn’t until December 27 that Blue Origin performed the final major test for the rocket, a 24-second static fire of the first stage and its seven BE-4 engines. That test came hours after Blue Origin received its FAA launch license for the rocket.
The company made its first attempt to launch New Glenn in the early morning hours of January 13, one that was frustrating at least to outside observers. On several occasions, the countdown clock reset, going back by 30 minutes or so with no explanation from the company on its webcast other than that they were aligning checklists and procedures. (Reporters who were covering the launch “in person”, at a press site Blue Origin set up in a hotel conference room in Cocoa Beach far to the south of LC-36, said they got no additional information.)
Ultimately, more than two hours into a three-hour launch window, Blue Origin scrubbed the launch, an outcome that was not surprising on the first attempt to launch a new rocket. “We’re standing down on today’s launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window,” it said. It did not elaborate on that issue until later in the day, when it stated that ice formed in a purge line associated with an auxiliary power unit that powers some of the rocket’s hydraulics.
The company tried again three days later. This time their checklists and procedures were properly aligned, and at 2:03 am EST, New Glenn lifted off for the first time. The rocket’s initial ascent was very slow, enough to make some viewers wonder if everything was working properly. But the vehicle followed the timeline published by Blue Origin in advance of the launch.
About 13 minutes after liftoff, the second stage shut down, having achieved orbit; it performed a second and final burn about 45 minutes later. Blue Origin declared the launch a success. “Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said in a post-launch statement.
The company released plenty of imagery and videos of the launch, but few other details about the NG-1 mission in the days after liftoff. In a social media post late January 17, Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, said that the Blue Ring Pathfinder payload had completed its brief mission in orbit.
“Our Blue Ring Pathfinder hit all our mission objectives within the planned six-hour journey after being inserted into the desired orbit by New Glenn with an apogee of 19,300 km and a perigee of 2,400 km at a 30-degree inclination,” he said, noting that the vehicle achieved its planned orbit “with a less than 1% deviation from our exact orbital injection target.”
| “We knew landing our booster, ‘So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,’ on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring,” Limp said. |
The mission, though, was not a complete success. The company had planned to land the first stage on Jacklyn, a ship in the Atlantic Ocean several hundred kilometers downrange from Cape Canaveral. On-screen telemetry and video from the booster, though, froze on the webcast at about the T+7:55 mark, around the time it was performing a reentry burn. Blue Origin acknowledged several minutes later on the webcast that the booster was lost, but provided no additional details.
The FAA said later that day that it will require Blue Origin to perform a mishap investigation before attempting the next New Glenn launch, calling the loss of the booster an “anomaly.”
“We’re working closely with the FAA and submitted our initial findings within 24 hours. Our goal is to fly New Glenn again this spring,” the company said a few days after launch.
Blue origin had played down the chances of landing the booster on its first flight, going so far as to name the booster “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” a line from the movie Dumb and Dumber. (The character who uttered the line did not have a chance.)
“We knew landing our booster, ‘So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,’ on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring,” Limp said in a statement after launch.
Blue Origin, though, had offered mixed messages about landing the booster in the recent past. “For this first launch, I have two primary objectives: get to orbit and land the booster,” Jones said at the World Space Business Week conference in September. “It’s super-critical because we have to get that down pat and then get our reusability and then get to rate. We can’t wait on it in 2025.”
Jones said then that Blue Origin wanted to perform eight to ten launches in 2025, a statement made at a time when the company was still hoping to perform a first launch in 2024. “But then, for 2026, we go straight into 24 launches,” he said.
 Starship/Super Heavy lifts off on its seventh integrated test flight January 16. (credit: SpaceX) |
Starship setback
Fifteen and a half hours after New Glenn took off from Florida, attention turned to SpaceX’s Starship test site in Boca Chica, Texas. There, the latest version of the company’s Starship/Super Heavy vehicle stood on the pad in the final preparations for launch.
This would be the seventh test flight of the system, and like the previous six was intended to be a suborbital flight to continue testing vehicle systems. However, this launch featured a “block upgrade” to the Starship upper stage, incorporating lessons learned from previous launches. That included making the vehicle about two meters longer to accommodate larger propellant tanks that could hold 25% more propellant.
SpaceX made changes to the vehicle’s thermal protection system, with new tiles and a layer underneath intended to provide protection in the event of damaged or missing tiles. Some tiles were deliberately removed to stress-test vulnerable areas, while the vehicle added some metallic tile options, some incorporating water cooling. The vehicle’s forward flaps were also redesigned to reduce heating on them.
| “Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month,” Musk predicted. |
While Starship would not reach orbit on this flight, the company planned to test capabilities needed for orbital missions, such as a relight of a Raptor engine. The stage would also release ten mass simulators of larger next-generation Starlink satellites, testing the deployment of those spacecraft through a slot-like payload door on the vehicle. (The payloads, like Starship itself, would not remain in orbit, reentering on similar trajectories.)
Liftoff took place at 5:37 pm EST and all seemed to go well in the first several minutes of the flight. The Super Heavy booster separated about two minutes after 45 seconds after liftoff and headed back to Starbase. As on the fifth test flight in October, the booster returned to the launch pad, where a pair of mechanical arms attached to the launch tower grappled the stage nearly seven minutes after liftoff.
The catch was so exciting that most people didn’t immediately notice that something had gone wrong with the Starship “ship” upper stage. One of the six Raptor engines shut down at the T+7:40 mark, according to the telemetry shown on the webcast, followed by two more about 20 seconds later. The telemetry froze at the T+8:25 mark, with the speed and altitude no longer updating and only one engine shown as firing.
SpaceX acknowledged several minutes later that there had been an “anomaly” of some kind and that the ship was lost. It didn’t elaborate, but a few thousand kilometers away, people on the Turks and Caicos Islands in the northern Caribbean saw debris streaking through the skies, some of which made it to the ground.
That debris also led the FAA to close airspace, with dozens of flights forced to hold, reroute, or even divert to other airports. “During the event, the FAA activated a Debris Response Area and briefly slowed aircraft outside the area where space vehicle debris was falling or stopped aircraft at their departure location,” the agency stated the day after the launch. “A Debris Response Area is activated only if the space vehicle experiences an anomaly with debris falling outside of the identified closed aircraft hazard areas.”
The FAA stated that it was investigating reports of property damage from falling debris in the Turks and Caicos, but didn't elaborate. Local officials said there were only “minimal” damage reported from the debris, which included items like the distinctive hexagonal tiles on Starship’s thermal protection system.
Shortly after the failure, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk offered an initial assessment of what went wrong. “Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity,” he posted on social media. “Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.”
SpaceX, though, may have to wait longer for the next launch. The FAA will require a mishap investigation for the Starship launch, one that may include reexamination of debris hazard zones on the flight path given what happened in the Turks and Caicos and the effects on the surrounding airspace.
Development gulf
The two launches were separated by less than 16 hours, but a far larger gulf exists between the two vehicles in terms of their design philosophies. Blue Origin tested extensively before its first launch to maximize the probability of successfully reaching orbit on its first launch. SpaceX has taken a more iterative approach, willing to fail and try again to make progress on each Starship test flight.
| Which approach is the “right” one for developing new vehicles? The answer may not be clear for years. |
For Blue Origin, that resulted in reaching orbit on its first launch, although without landing the booster as it hoped. It also meant, though, that the first launch was years behind schedule. SpaceX had made incremental progress with each Starship launch until this latest setback. Yet, nearly two years after the first Starship/Super Heavy launch, the vehicle has yet to attempt to reach orbit, with many milestones ahead before a version of that vehicle is ready to land NASA astronauts on the Moon on the Artemis 3 mission as soon as 2027.
Which approach is the “right” one for developing new vehicles? The answer may not be clear for years, based on how well New Glenn and Starship ultimately perform. What is clear, though, is that this is a remarkable time: a chance to see two different heavy-lift rockets conducting test flights at the same time, demonstrating different technological and development approaches.
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