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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @08:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has unveiled plans for a new rocket with a reusable booster:

The rocket – named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth – is meant to take astronauts into orbit and beyond. It will come in a two-stage and a three-stage variant, both of which will have recoverable boosters. "New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space," wrote Jeff Bezos in a statement. "The 3-stage variant – with its high specific impulse hydrogen upper stage – is capable of flying demanding beyond-LEO [low Earth orbit] missions."

The rocket will be 7 metres in diameter and range between 82 and 95 metres tall. That makes it physically larger than any current rockets and nearly as big as the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the moon.

To lift all that, New Glenn will have 17 million Newtons of thrust from seven engines, about half the lifting power of the Saturn V. That makes it competitive but not the biggest among the planned heavy lift rockets. NASA's Space Launch System will have 37 million Newtons of thrust, and SpaceX's Flacon Heavy will have 22 million. None of these heavy lifters have flown yet, however. Bezos says he plans to launch the New Glenn rocket by the end of the decade, and hinted at an even bigger rocket to come, called New Armstrong.

Also at Reuters.


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday September 14 2016, @04:43PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @04:43PM (#401882)

    Can we use all the new toys to launch more humans, more probes and more deep space telescopes, rather than more military comms, shitty-TV repeaters, spy satellites and Facebook sats (oh wait, I already said spy)...

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