Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin successfully launched the New Glenn rocket today, which will be used in the coming years to send the modules in which astronauts will descend to the lunar surface into space as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
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The other company developing a rocket to launch lunar landing modules, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has not yet managed to get its new Starship rocket into commercial service after incidents in the eleven test launches carried out so far.
The Artemis program schedule foresees launching the first lunar landing module in 2027 for the Artemis 3 mission, which will not go to the Moon but will test docking maneuvers with the Orion capsule in Earth orbit. The plan for future missions to the Moon foresees astronauts taking off from Earth in an Orion capsule and then transferring to the lunar landing modules to descend to the satellite’s surface.
Neither Blue Origin nor SpaceX have their lunar landing modules ready yet. NASA hopes to be able to carry out the Artemis 3 mission next year with at least one of the two modules.
Today’s launch was the third for a New Glenn rocket – all three successfully completed – and the first in which a booster previously used in an earlier launch was employed. Blue Origin has been inspired by SpaceX’s precedent to recover and reuse rocket components to lower launch costs.
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The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 1:25 PM (Spanish peninsular time) and placed a communications satellite from AST SpaceMobile into orbit. Ten minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage landed on a ship waiting for it in the Atlantic about 500 kilometers away.
At 98 meters tall, the New Glenn is similar in size to NASA’s SLS, on which the Artemis 2 mission astronauts launched to the Moon on April 1. Blue Origin is working on two versions of the rocket. The one used in the first three launches has the capacity to send payloads of up to 7,000 kilograms to the Moon. A more powerful version under development will be able to send up to 20,000 kilograms. Neither version is designed for crewed missions.
The rocket is named in homage to John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.
