What Happened To Blue Origin?
So, what ever happened to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and ambition to conquer space? Let’s get into this.
Like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos also has a lot of plans regarding space ventures so he made a company named ‘Blue Origin’.
Firstly. Let’s look at the New Shepard by Blue Origin, which is around 60 feet or about 1/4 height of the new Falcon9 from SpaceX. Space X has already completed their boosters’ successful landings; however, technically the Blue origin would become the 1st company to land a rocket booster safely after the new Shepard booster landed in 2015 from a space flight. There are many differences between the two rockets. Firstly, we will talk about before descend speeds. New Shepard can reach up to Mach 3; however, the Falcon 9 can reach up to Mach 5.5 and Mach 7.The second is their landing method.
It should be noted that the new Shepard is agile enough to throw down its engine and hover above the Landing site, allowing for control landing or aborting an attempt and retrying it if it is not correct. It can also descend velocity at will, coming down slowly and gently to a point where you could almost do it by a handheld remote. Because Falcon 9 needs much larger engines and has lost virtually all its fuel mass, it cannot hover. This means it has to land by a method called Suicide burn.
The booster learnings are pretty impressive nonetheless; aside from being fully reusable, New Shepard is expected to promote the space tourism industry further. New Shepard will launch vertically for about two and a half minutes before the most engine cut-off when passenger flights happen. The capsule then separates from the rocket; passengers are weightless for about four minutes during the 11-minute flight and are high enough at an altitude of 307,000 feet or 100 kilometres to ascertain Earth’s curvature. The spacecraft floats for a couple of minutes in space before re-entering the atmosphere. New Shepard lands using an autonomous, rocket-powered vertical landing system.
Additionally to six passengers, the spacecraft aboard New Shepard can carry standardized experiments of up to 50 lbs, with more extensive custom requests options. The ticket price of this venture is about $200,000. However, Virgin Galactic offers its services for an equivalent price tag and can be a potential competitor to Blue Origin. Moreover, Virgin Galactic trains the passengers three days before the flight, while Blue Origin expects its passengers to prepare for only one day.
Let’s move on. We have the imminent new Glenn rocket. Named after pioneering astronaut John Glenn, New Glenn is a single configuration heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of carrying people and payloads routinely to Earth’s orbit and beyond. With a size of 95 meters, it has a payload capacity of 45 metric tons to the low orbit and 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit. New Glenn is a solid, cost-competitive framework with tall availability. The 7-meter fairing has two times the payload volume of any existing launch vehicle, which implies more room for satellites.
New Glenn can also launch and land in 95% of climate conditions, making it a solid alternative for payload clients. And the New Glenn’s booster is expected to be able to last 25 launches. Civil, commercial, and national security customers can all find solutions in New Glenn’s high-performance configuration. Initially, it was funded by the air force. However, they retracted from it later on in 2020 and adopted other contenders like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. However, it was not a downer for the company. The company has invested about $2.5 billion in New Glenn and about $1 billion was used to rebuild the LC-36 launchpad.
Blue Origin’s work at LC-36 includes constructing a tower that can support launching people on New Glenn, which the company hopes to do later. We would have to wait another year regarding its launching date as the company hopes to launch New Glenn 2023. Once done, it will take crew members to International Space stations along with equipment and will the first orbital launch vehicle. Let’s see another project of this company.
Blue Moon is a flexible lander delivering a wide variety of small, medium, and large payloads to the lunar surface, whether cargo or crew. Its capability to provide precise and soft landings will enable a sustained human presence on the Moon. This moon lander will utilize Blue Origin’s new BE-7 engines. Those new engines will be powered by a combination of liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX). Blue Moon has a 7 meters payload bay that will stand about 14 feet 4 m with its four landing legs fully deployed. When it’s fully loaded with fuel, the lander weighs about 16.5 tons (15 metric tons). By the time it reaches the lunar surface, the lander will weigh only about 3.3 tons, burning up almost all of its fuel.
The Blue Moon is meant to deliver loads to the lunar surface, with two variants being the 3.6 and 6.5 metric ton capability. It also can launch small satellites into the Moon’s orbit. It is expected to be used on crewed missions. The regular Blue Moon is only designed to make one-way trips to the Moon to maximize payload volume; However, the more prominent brand will also carry sufficient fuel along with an ascent module to enable round trips to the Moon. NASA is expected to use the Blue Moon in its plan to return people to the Moon in 2024 using its imminent space launch system.
Viewing the space launch system itself has quite a bit of development left to go. The plan is to use Blue Moon to land astronauts on the Moon instead of building their own new lunar landing system. In the end, the owner of the company has still a lot of plans with the company that includes concerns regarding the energy crisis and setting up larger solar panel to store energy in space and transport them back to Earth. In addition to that, the problem is about the air pollution that increases day by day. This may include a project to setup industries in space that cannot be converted to Earth-friendly. In the end, Blue origins are working hard on 3 of its projects in the hope of setting up a lunar base shortly.
OUTRO:
So, guys, that was our take on explaining current situation of the Blue Origin. We would love to hear your opinions in the comments section. If, you liked this video do leave us with a thumbs up and consider subscribing to our channel. We will catch you in the next one. Until then, PEACE!
