Jeff Bezos finally got his big shiny rocket to do a very cool trick on Sunday morning. At 7:25 am, the New Glenn vehicle roared off its pad at Cape Canaveral with enough fire to make everyone in Florida look up from their breakfast.
This rocket stands 321 feet tall, which makes it about as high as a 30-story building.
After three minutes of hard work, the bottom part of the rocket came home and stood perfectly still on a ship in the ocean.
This was the second time this specific booster flew into space and back. It proves that the BE-4 engines are not just for show and can actually be used again.
Bezos named this booster “Never Tell Me The Odds,” and for a few minutes, the odds looked very good indeed.
But the top part of the rocket had other plans for the day. While the booster was chilling on its ship, the upper stage was supposed to drop off a very expensive AST SpaceMobile satellite. Instead of putting it in the right spot, the rocket missed the mark and left the satellite in a bad orbit.
This upper stage uses two BE-3U engines that run on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
These engines are very tricky because hydrogen is a tiny molecule that loves to leak out of any small hole it finds.
One small hiccup in the plumbing can ruin a very expensive trip to space.
The mission ended with a mix of cheers for the landing and sighs for the lost cargo.
On the deck of the landing ship, the booster looked like a giant burnt marshmallow but remained standing. This landing happened 400 miles away from the launch pad in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. To get there, the rocket had to fall through the air faster than a bullet and then light its engines to slow down at the last second.
It uses giant fins at the top to steer itself like a skydiver.
If those fins move even a tiny bit the wrong way, the whole thing flips and becomes a very expensive firework.
This time, the math worked out perfectly, and the ship stayed upright.
Science is basically just being very good at making sure things don’t blow up when you don’t want them to.
An investigation into the heart of it
And then there is the matter of the methane. Most rockets use kerosene, which is basically fancy jet fuel, but New Glenn uses liquefied natural gas. Methane is great because it burns clean and does not leave a bunch of soot inside the engine pipes. If you want to fly a rocket many times, you need the engines to stay clean so you don’t have to scrub them with a toothbrush between flights.
The BE-4 engine is the heart of this plan, and seven of them work together to push the rocket off the ground.
Each one creates half a million pounds of thrust.
That is a lot of kick for a machine that has to work perfectly every single time.
An all-access look inside
Inside the nose of the rocket, there is enough space to hold three school buses. This massive room is called the fairing, and it protects the satellites from the wind as the rocket screams through the sky. For this flight, the fairing held a satellite designed to give cell phone service from space.
These satellites are basically giant antennas that unfold in orbit.
Because they are so big, they catch the wind like a sail if the rocket is not pointed in the exact right direction.
If the upper stage wobbles even a little, the satellite ends up in the wrong neighborhood of space.
Precision is the only thing that keeps a multi-million dollar satellite from becoming very high-altitude junk.
The Rocket That Thinks Size Truly Matters
Because the New Glenn is so big, it can carry twice as much stuff as the smaller rockets we see every week. This makes it a big deal for NASA’s Artemis program, which wants to put people back on the moon. Bezos wants to use this rocket to carry a lunar lander called Blue Moon. But before you can go to the moon, you have to be able to hit a target orbit around Earth. This failure with the upper stage shows that even the richest man in the world cannot buy his way past the laws of physics.
Space is still incredibly hard, even when you have a very tall rocket and a very nice boat.
This might be surprising
The business of putting cell phone towers in space is getting very crowded and very loud. Companies are now building satellites that are so big they look like bright stars moving across the night sky. This causes a lot of talk among people who like to look at the stars with telescopes. If we put thousands of these giant antennas in orbit, the sky might never look the same again.
It is a trade-off between having 5G in the middle of the desert and being able to see the constellations clearly.
Some people think it is a great idea, while others think we are just cluttering up the view for no reason.
- Read about the first five BlueBird satellites and how they unfold.
- Check out the NASA Artemis mission map to see where New Glenn fits in.
- Look up the Vulcan Centaur launch which uses the same BE-4 engines.
- Study the effects of satellite constellations on ground-based astronomy.
But should we really be letting private companies fill up the sky? Some experts argue that the “Wild West” era of space needs more rules before we have too many crashes. For example, a report by Scientific American points out that space junk is becoming a real danger to the International Space Station.
If the New Glenn upper stage stays in the wrong orbit, it might eventually bump into something else. This leads to a debate about who is responsible for cleaning up the mess when a rocket doesn’t do its job. Is it the company that launched it, or the company that owns the satellite?
Right now, there is no “space police” to hand out tickets for littering.
Bonus features
The landing platform for New Glenn is a massive ship named Jacklyn, after Jeff Bezos’s mother. Unlike some other landing pads, this one is designed to keep the rocket stable even in rough seas. The rocket is so heavy that it stays put mostly by its own weight, but the ship has special gear to lock it down once it touches the deck. Another fun detail is that the BE-4 engine uses a “staged combustion cycle,” which is a very fancy way of saying it reuses its own exhaust to get more power.
It is like a car that gets better gas mileage by breathing in its own smoke.
This makes the engine much more powerful than the ones used on older rockets.
Even though the mission had a bad ending for the satellite, the engine performance is a massive win for future flights.
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