A lot of hardware scheduled to be sent into space broke this week, but listening to the rocket companies responsible for the disruption, little untoward happened. “Hooray! Orbit. It was a great night for Team Blue,” David Limp, CEO of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, said on Jan. 14 of the company’s New Glenn rocket. Posted on X after the first launch of , which ended with the upper stage payload successfully reaching orbit. However, the first stage was supposed to make a gentle landing on a downrange barge, but crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company got cocky two days after the Jan. 16 launch of its giant Starship rocket upended that scenario. The rocket’s first stage was successfully recovered between giant chopstick-like tongs on the Texas launch pad, but the second stage was lost in a massive explosion 8 minutes and 27 seconds into the flight. “Starship underwent an unscheduled rapid dismantling,” the company euphemistically posted on X.
But it was the second of these X articles that told the real story of the incomplete flight. “As we head into the spring, we will try again to land,” Limp wrote of Blue Origin’s plans for a second launch in just a few months. “The team will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand the root cause,” SpaceX wrote. “With tests like this, success comes from what we learn. Today’s flight will help improve Starship’s reliability.”
Rocket science has always been a highly iterative process, requiring a large number of failed launches before engineers get things right. In NASA’s early days, nearly half of the Atlas boosters that launched Mercury astronauts into space failed on test flights before they were finally deemed safe to carry humans. The Titan missile that launched the two Gemini crew members shook itself to pieces on its first unmanned flight. And what about the famous Saturn V, the amazing machine that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon?
In 1968, after Saturn V’s last unmanned flight nearly crash-landed in the ocean, Chris Craft, NASA’s director of flight and crew operations, told reporters, “This was a disaster.” “I want to stress that: It was a disaster.”
But Atlas flew, Titan flew, Saturn flew, so if the history of the universe is any guide, New Glenn and Starship will fly too. But it doesn’t come without a lot of effort.
Of the two new rockets tested this week, New Glenn had the most to prove. Founded in 2000, Blue Origin is the brainchild of Amazon CEO Bezos, who led the company to become a regular provider of space transportation for both cargo and crew, transporting humanity to and from Earth. It envisions becoming a major player in both species and producing millions of people outside. Eventually, the appearance of people living in space. The company has successfully launched 28 small New Shepard rockets (nine with passengers on board) on Popgun suborbital missions, but has never placed a payload into orbit. This is compared to the astonishing number of successful launches for SpaceX’s flagship rocket, the Falcon 9, and 11 for its large rocket, the Falcon Heavy. Starship is still in the experimental phase and has flown seven times so far.
New Glenn has been in development for 10 years and was scheduled for its first launch in 2020, but it has not been able to match the intense research and development of the Falcons. But in many ways, it was worth the wait. The first stage is powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines, a cleaner fuel than the kerosene used in the Falcon 9. Together, these engines generate 3.85 million pounds of thrust. That’s about half the thrust the Saturn 5 produced, and slightly less. 5 million pounds of Falcon Heavy. But New Glenn still counts as a muscle-bound missile.
“A single BE-4 turbopump fits in the back seat of your car,” Limp writes in X. “[But]when all seven pump fuel and oxygen out of a common shaft in the BE-4, it generates enough horsepower to propel two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at full tilt.”
Despite the failed first stage landing this week, New Glenn is designed to be reusable, with each rocket built to make up to 25 flights, carrying cargo and crew. It is intended to carry both. With SpaceX already dominating the commercial launch field, Blue Origin may seem like an afterthought, but that’s not the case. If the long drought between manned launches from U.S. soil proved anything, from the grounding of NASA’s shuttle in 2011 until the first manned Falcon 9 flight in 2020, it’s that the nation and industry It is never a good idea to rely on just one resource. Single firing system.
“Most satellite providers want to have at least two options for different redundancies,” says Scott Pace, director of the George Washington University Space Policy Institute.
This is true more than ever now that NASA has largely exited the launch business, handing over that work to the private sector. The closest equivalent to a Saturn 5 currently in the space agency’s fleet is the Space Launch System (SLS), used by the Artemis program, which aims to return American astronauts to the moon by the end of the century. It is a huge rocket designed to With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever launched, but it still produces just over half of Starship’s 16 million pounds of thrust. Still, the SLS is a premium machine. It flew uncrewed only once in 2022, costing more than $2 billion per launch, and is not scheduled to fly again until Artemis II’s manned lunar orbit in April 2026.
“SLS works in environments with poor hardware,” Pace says. “You only have one or two of these things. The big advantage that SpaceX has, and hopefully New Glenn will have, is that they can operate in a hardware-rich environment. They have a lot of (rockets) to work with. I have it.”
Starship has already proven that. SpaceX has been able to afford to be flippant about the X because the company has always operated on a fast-fail, fast-fail, re-flight metabolism. The seven Starship launches since 2023 have easily outpaced the SLS’s erratic pace, and NASA has enough confidence in the rocket to replace Starship’s upper stage with the Human Landing System (21 of the Apollo-era Lunar Landers). It was even used as the 19th Century Edition). —For the Artemis III lunar landing mission. Much of the work Falcon 9 is currently doing involves delivering cargo and crew to the International Space Station. But once the station is deorbited in 2030, the Falcon 9 rationale may follow suit, especially if Starship is in flight rotation by then.
“There are rumors that SpaceX has no intention of continuing to fly the Falcon 9 once the space station program ends,” Pace said. “So what New Glenn is looking at is a high flight rate Starship environment.”
Their environment, in which both Starship and New Glenn regularly fly in Earth orbit and ultimately to the Moon and beyond, is especially challenging in the commercial launch sector and in the U.S., where boosters from other countries are not a viable option. It will be a good environment for them. For American and other Western customers. “We don’t use Chinese launch vehicles,” Pace said. “Russian launch vehicles are almost gone because of sanctions.” Meanwhile, Japan’s H3 booster and Europe’s Ariane 6 would welcome American companies, but currently cannot compete with SpaceX on price. , there is a high possibility that it will not partner with New Glenn either.
Even as debris from this week’s troubled launch was still rattling at sea, both SpaceX and Blue Origin were ramping up for their next flights. Space launches are always equal parts adventure and hard business, and both companies aim to play a high-stakes game of both.