WASHINGTON — Blue Origin expects to attempt its second New Glenn launch in late spring after correcting problems that prevented the booster from landing on the first launch last month.
Speaking at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference here Feb. 12, Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, suggested a propulsion issue of some kind caused the loss of the New Glenn booster during its landing attempt on the Jan. 16 NG-1 launch.
“We had most of the right conditions in the engine but we weren’t able to get everything right to the engine from the tanks,” he said. “We think we understand what the issues are.”
Telemetry was lost from the booster, according to data displayed on the company’s webcast of the launch, at about T+7:55 mark, during a reentry burn by three of the seven BE-4 engines in the booster. The company did not disclose what happened to the booster at that point and Limp declined to go into additional details. He noted, though, that demonstrating the in-flight relight of the BE-4 engines was one thing Blue Origin could not demonstrate before the launch.
“It was a combination of a couple things,” he said. “This was our first attempt at it. I don’t want to go into too much detail because we’re still going through the anomaly investigation. I feel like the team has a really good handle to it and modifications are not complicated.”
A second booster is in production. “I don’t think it’s going to delay our path to flight,” he said of the investigation. “I think we can still fly late spring.”
Blue Origin has not announced the payload for the second New Glenn launch, and Limp said the company has a “couple of different options” for it. “We sort of treat the first three flights as development flights. If we can get commercial payloads on them, we will do so,” he said. “If it came to it and we just had to fly a mass simulator, we’ll fly a mass simulator.”
Blue Moon and… Blue Mars?
Limp did not discuss plans beyond the second launch for New Glenn, but suggested one upcoming launch will be of the Mark 1 version of its Blue Moon lunar lander, a robotic lander that serves as a technology demonstrator for its larger, crewed Blue Moon Mark 2 lander it is developing for NASA’s Human Landing System program.
“I’m still very confident that we can get on the moon this year,” he said. That lander, capable of carrying three metric tons of cargo, would be the largest spacecraft yet to land on the moon, he added.
He argued that it was still important for the United States to pursue lunar exploration even with the new Trump administration’s interest in Mars. “I think the last thing that we want is another Sputnik moment where another nation-state put boots on the moon before we do,” he said.
However, Limp argued that the architecture Blue Moon and other companies, like SpaceX, have developed for lunar exploration can also be applied to Mars. “It turns out that those systems, and the conops [concept of operations] for those systems, are very reusable for a Mars mission.”
Blue Origin was among the companies selected by NASA last year to perform concept studies for new approaches to Mars Sample Return (MSR), leveraging its work on Blue Moon. NASA announced Jan. 7 that it would select unspecified “commercial landers” as one of two options for further study in a revised MSR architecture.
Limp cited work on engines, in-space refueling and development of a tug that would take Blue Moon to lunar orbit as capabilities that could be applied to a Mars mission, likening them to LEGO bricks that can be reassembled.
“You can rearchitect them, put them together, and it turns out that a manned mission to Mars or a cargo mission to Mars reuses the vast majority of these,” he said. “Modifying these systems is not as much a heavy lift as some people think.”
Limp acknowledged that a Mars version of the architecture, particularly one for crewed missions, would require new technologies like life support systems that “are probably more difficult problems to solve.”
