The Epoch of True Spaceflight
Two massive rockets in one day are a sign of an accelerating new era in space
I woke up early on Thursday morning to witness the first launch of New Glenn, the first orbital launch vehicle from Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin . The window opened at 6am my time, and the launch occurred at 7:03am I also stayed up late that evening to witness the seventh launch of a full stack Starship at 10:37pm. In a span of less than sixteen hours the United States launched two reusable super heavy lift rockets, both with prototype reusable first stages and one with a prototype reusable upper stage. Neither launch successfully achieved all objectives, but I know of nobody knowledgeable about such things that doesn’t believe subsequent flights will perfect these systems.
It is hard to imagine a greater display of how America has leapt ahead of other nations in launch technology. Europe, Russia, China and others have yet to replicate vehicles like Falcon 9 and New Shepard, which demonstrated reuse a decade ago.
New Glenn
Blue Origin have been working on New Glenn for many years. It was first announced in 2016 with a promised debut in 2020, but the company moved slowly on it. During the time between the announcement and its first launch, Falcon 9 went from 8 launches per year to 134 launches per year, perfecting first stage reuse on the way.
Most of this period was under CEO Bob Smith, who was replaced in December 2023 by Dave Limp with Jeff Bezos emphasising his “sense of urgency” in a company-wide email. Bezos himself stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021 in part to devote more of his time to Blue Origin, so it is reasonable to suspect the work on the rocket was accelerated with his direct involvement as well.
The first launch of the rocket was very successful. Many commentators noted the low acceleration of the vehicle as it left the pad, and it has also been noticed that the payload it was carrying is less than half the 45 tonnes originally promised. What we saw is not going to be the final iteration of New Glenn though, so can’t be taken as evidence of any fault with the design.
The first stage ascent went well, without any engines out, and the second stage completed both its burns successfully to put the payload (a pathfinder for their Blue Ring satellite bus) into orbit.
The attempted first stage recovery, which the company did say was risky, did not fare well though. The rocket began its entry burn at a velocity of around 2,260 metres per second and an altitude of 41 kilometres. There was 12 seconds of deceleration down to around 1,920 m/s at an altitude of 26km, at which point the telemetry on the live stream abruptly ceased.
This seems quite low in the atmosphere for a reentry burn - on the recent Falcon 9 mission which launched two lunar landers, the booster started its reentry burn at a similar velocity but at an altitude of 64km. Assuming the telemetry in both cases is correct, this means that the New Glenn booster would have faced around 15 times the dynamic pressure of Falcon 9 at the time of its entry burn. The livestream also showed what appeared to be a brief shot of the relight, with a yellowish flame perhaps indicating overly fuel rich combustion. There was significant deceleration at about 3g, so the engines were working - and it is hard to make many more inferences just from the live stream.
The payload delivery was the most important part for the company though - the payload does not care about the fate of the booster, and like SpaceX did with Falcon 9 they can continue to debug booster recovery while flying useful and paying missions. The next one is due to be a pathfinder for their Blue Moon lunar lander.
Starship Filght 7
The seventh launch of a full stack Starship provided two striking visuals - the booster being caught by the launch tower, and the disintegration of the upper stage over the Turks and Chaicos islands. During ascent, there had been some material flapping loosely on the side of the ship, and flames visible around the hinge of one of the rear flaps. This fire spread during the burn and ultimately led to the shut down of the engines and the breakup of the vehicle.
This was seized upon by critics of the program as a terrible failure, an environmental catastrophe, or even proof that humanity would never reach Mars. Truthfully this is a setback for the program - there hasn’t been a loss of the vehicle on ascent since Flight 2 in November 2023, and critical tests of the thermal protection system were precluded. Given the debris falling from the destroyed ship led to several planes being diverted, the FAA has asked for SpaceX to conduct an investigation of the anomaly before flying again. It is doubtful this will cause as much of a delay as the critics hope it will - the damage to the timescale of the program is likely measured in weeks not months.
The significance of the booster catch also shouldn’t be overshadowed. SpaceX have now done this twice, on flights 5 and 7, along with 2 successful virtual catches over water on flights 4 and 6.
Take a moment to consider what a feat this is. The booster is 9 metres in diameter and 70 metres tall, basically a flying skyscraper. It starts its landing burn at around the speed of sound, not much more than 1 kilometre above the ground. It lights 13 engines directly into the dense airflow, decelerates at 4g for 12 seconds before going down to three engines and more gently hovering into the arms over the course of the next 17 seconds. Any failure in this process would send it crashing into the ground at high speed. The rocket is then lowered back on to the launch mount it departed from by the chopsticks - potentially, in future iterations, ready to be refilled, restacked and reflown.
A Rising Tide
The day of giant rockets was market by a great deal of camaraderie between Musk, Bezos, and their respective teams. There have been disputes before over intellectual property and spectrum rights, but overall space is big enough for both companies to thrive and grow.
For the time being, New Glenn won’t come close to equaling the amount of mass that Falcon 9 can put into orbit, and it is less advanced in terms of reusability than Starship, but it will swiftly surpass in capability and cadence new expendable rockets such as Vulcan and Ariane 6. It is possible to lag SpaceX by quite a bit and still be ahead of the rest of the competition, because the gap is so large. Other competitors in the US, such as Rocket Lab and Stoke Space, are expected to debut medium lift reusable rockets in the next year, which is sure to make the case for expendable launch vehicles even more tenuous. Reuse is simply becoming the way rockets work in the 21st century, and expending them after a single launch is going to be seen as wasteful madness before long.
Europe and Russia have paid lip service to this by starting research projects into their own reusable launch vehicles, but these are a long way from realization. Outside the US it is only really China that is anywhere close, with the government developed Long March 10A and the privately developed Zhuque-3, both medium lift vehicles, likely to achieve first stage reuse in the next few years if all goes to plan.
Space is so critical for commercial, military and scientific applications that its not an understatement that the ongoing revolution in launch and spaceflight is going to shift the balance of power in the world. The coming years will bring more intense competition between the leading nations, and a sense of crisis among those who have failed to keep up, and pressure on their governments to take action.
The 2020s is shaping up to be a decade of radical change, and we get to watch it all unfold.
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