This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.
Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, is silently progressing towards the first hot fire test of its New Glenn rocket. Powered by in-house engines, New Glenn is also designed to land on a ship like SpaceX's Falcon 9. It is also more powerful than SpaceX's workhorse and operational rocket, and footage from media in Florida shows that Blue Origin's barge came back to port at Cape Canaveral late last night after offshore testing. The return marks another step in the rocket's test campaign, with a major hot fire of its engines expected to occur soon.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket uses seven BE-4 rocket engines to produce 3.8 million pounds of thrust. This is more than twice the thrust of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which uses nine smaller Merlin 1D engines to generate 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket that competes with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which is far more powerful than it and generates 5.1 million pounds through its 27 Merlin 1D engines spread equally across three boosters.
Like the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy's boosters, the New Glenn's single booster is also designed to be fully reusable. Blue Origin aims to land it on a barge in the ocean, and ahead of an anticipated hot fire test before the year ends, the firm has finished a round of offshore tests on its barge. As per footage from local media, these were communication tests involving a helicopter.
Landing the New Glenn's first-stage booster should be more complex than the Falcon 9 due to the former's size, and if Blue Origin is successful, then the rocket will become the first heavy lift vehicle to complete a ship landing.
October has been a busy month for the New Glenn. Blue Origin spent most of the month installing the seven BE-4 engines on the rocket to prepare it for a hot fire. Similar to the Falcon's Merlin engines, some of the BE-4s on the New Glenn are also capable of gimbaling. This allows them to move around a vertical central point to control the rocket during its ascent and landing on Blue Orign's recovery ship, Jacklyn.
After engine installation, the rocket went from Blue Origin's facilities to Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. According to CEO Dave Limp, the next stage in New Glenn's campaign is an integrated launch vehicle hot fire. This test will stack the second stage on the first stage booster and briefly fire the first stage's engines. Blue Origin tested the second stage's engines through a similar test in late September.
The hot fire was the first test with flight hardware, and it saw Blue Origin fire up the two BE-3U engines on the second stage. The BE-3Us use liquid hydrogen as their propellant as opposed to the BE-4, which uses easier-to-handle methane. New Glenn is an important part of Blue Origin's plans, as not only will it launch a portion of Amazon's Kuiper low Earth orbit satellite internet constellation, but the rocket is also the launch vehicle of choice for the Blue Moon lander contracted by NASA to land humans on the Moon under the Artemis program.