Blue Origin’s highly effective new rocket is beginning to come collectively.
The corporate, which was based by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, introduced on Monday (Jan. 21) that it has mated the 2 levels of its New Glenn heavy lifter for the primary time.
The milestone, which occurred at Launch Advanced 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station in Florida, will allow Blue Origin “to train our tooling and stage interfaces in preparation for our first launch later this 12 months,” the corporate wrote on Monday in a post on X that shared a photograph of the joined levels.
Associated: Info about Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight firm
The primary stage concerned within the linkup made the journey to LC-36 from Blue Origin’s manufacturing unit on Florida’s Area Coast about two weeks in the past, as the corporate defined in a previous X post.
The 2-stage New Glenn will stand 322 toes (98 meters) tall and be capable to haul 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. That is about twice the payload capability of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
Just like the Falcon 9, New Glenn’s first stage is designed to be reusable. The booster will probably be powered by seven of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, which flew for the primary time earlier this month on the debut flight of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket.
That launch went nicely, by the best way, although the payload — Astrobotic’s Peregrine moon lander — suffered issues of its personal in deep house and ended up crashing again to Earth.
New Glenn has been in improvement for greater than a decade. The heavy lifter’s debut was initially targeted for 2020, nevertheless it has been pushed again a number of occasions.
The eventual first flight will loft NASA’s two-spacecraft EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars mission. Liftoff is at present scheduled for this coming August.
