New Glenn

And so, and I guess that's still what they're doing.

Because they're the New Glenn has not uh, returned to a flyback booster yet, as far as I remember, but maybe that's coming up.

I hope so.

It's not fly back.

Thank you.

Three mark one, uh, modified mark one landers turned into transfer stages.

So there would be three of those that would be launched, um, the lander would be launched out of New Glenn, and then there's a stack of those transfer stages with the lander.

Two of the three transfer stages send that blue moon lander into an elliptical polar orbit of the moon, and then a remaining transfer stage would lower that to a low lunar orbit, from which they would do the landing, come back up, rejoin with the Orion, and then return to Earth.

First up is Blue Origin.

A new Glenn launches a test version of its Blue Moon Mark II lander from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral.

And it sits in orbit while Blue Origin checks it out.

Then the crew.

He was blunt about the size of the job, calling what they're attempting extraordinarily difficult.

And look at the hardware.

Blue Origin's New Glenn hasn't flown since a launch pad explosion during a static fire test in May.

So that pad is being rebuilt.

That's what that earnings call suggested, John.

Starship launches and New Glenn launches.

Have we got fixed dates?

Well, we have dates as per the FAA, and this is kind of important.

Now, these dates we had previously, so they're still tentative dates that the FAA is listing.

SpaceX hasn't confirmed them because SpaceX is still going through the preparatory work for both missions, but those are the target dates.

What was more big news is that the FAA is now listing a tentative launch date for New Glenn at December 28th.

Jeff Bezos, in an early interview this month, had mentioned that date as an aside, but it wasn't a confirmed date in any way.

I'll just have a few highlights on those.

In January, this is the maiden flight of New Glenn.

This is Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, finally flies their big, big rocket, the seven-meter rocket.

I would argue the rocket Elon could have built ages ago instead of going straight to Starship.

every time this is like only the third one you have to say why do we keep seeing these now new instruments they've always been there we just didn't see them before we now have the tech to actually notice that there's stuff blasting in and out you know flying in and out of our solar system and it takes years like they're moving really very fast yeah And that's how we know that they're interstellar, because they're at a velocity where it's like there's no way the sun can capture that.

It's just going to keep going.

In November, the second launch of New Glenn is the one that carried the cool payload, the Escapade mission to Mars.

This is a pair of spacecraft creatively named Blue and Gold.

Hmm.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is expanding its Florida operations to support a much faster launch schedule, targeting multiple New Glenn flights per week by the end of the decade.

The plan includes a 330 million manufacturing expansion, additional launch pads, and new facilities for payload processing and booster refurbishment.

This will be competition of sorts for SpaceX, but not that much.

While New Glenn will be able to push up to 45 metric tons to LEO in its reusable launch configuration, Starship will be pushing 200 metric tons in its own reusable configuration.

And while the New Glenn features a reusable first stage booster, Starship is fully reusable.

So, New Glenn will be more expensive to operate, but given that launch demand far exceeds supply, price sensitivity won't be a differentiating factor.

New Glenn is targeting up to 50 launches per year by the end of the decade, while SpaceX is aiming for 50 to 100 launches in 2027 and 456 launches per year after that.