| Title | NASA-Funded Blue Origin Study Could Lead to Repurposing of New Glenn Upper Stages in Orbit | |
| Date | Thursday March 21 2019, @09:47PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the commercial-applications? dept. | ||
Blue Origin studying repurposing of New Glenn upper stages
Blue Origin has studied repurposing upper stages of its future New Glenn launch vehicle to serve as habitats or for other applications as part of a series of NASA-funded commercialization studies.
Brett Alexander, vice president of government sales and strategy at Blue Origin, said the company looked at ways it could make use of the second stage of New Glenn rather than simply deorbiting the stage at the end of each launch, but emphasized the company currently had no firm plans to reuse those stages at this time.
[...] That included, he said, turning those stages into habitation modules or other facilities for commercial use in Earth orbit. Those stages could be launched already outfitted for those uses or refitted once in orbit.
"We don't have actual plans at this moment" to reuse the upper stages in those ways, he noted. "We'll see what the best approach is at the end of the day."
Better to go fully reusable. New Armstrong?
Related: Lockheed Martin Repurposing Shuttle Cargo Module to Use for Lunar Orbiting Base
ISRO Will Attempt to Repurpose the Final Stage of a Rocket as a Satellite
Blue Origin to Provide Multiple Orbital Launches for Telesat
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printed from SoylentNews, NASA-Funded Blue Origin Study Could Lead to Repurposing of New Glenn Upper Stages in Orbit on 2024-04-25 04:34:55