Blue Foundation’s robust new rocket is beginning to come in combination.The corporate, which used to be based by means of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, introduced on Monday (Jan. 21) that it has mated the 2 levels of its New Glenn heavy lifter for the primary time.The milestone, which befell at Release Advanced 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station in Florida, will allow Blue Foundation “to workout our tooling and degree interfaces in preparation for our first release later this yr,” the corporate wrote on Monday in a submit on X that shared a photograph of the joined levels.Comparable: Information about Blue Foundation, Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight corporate
The primary degree of Blue Foundation’s first New Glenn rocket rolls to Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station’s Release Advanced 36 on this picture, which Blue Foundation posted to X on Jan. 10, 2024. (Symbol credit score: Blue Foundation by way of X)The primary degree concerned within the linkup made the commute to LC-36 from Blue Foundation’s manufacturing facility on Florida’s Area Coast about two weeks in the past, as the corporate defined in a prior X submit.The 2-stage New Glenn will stand 322 ft (98 meters) tall and have the ability to haul 50 lots (45 metric lots) to low Earth orbit. That is about two times the payload capability of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.Just like the Falcon 9, New Glenn’s first degree is designed to be reusable. The booster will likely be powered by means of seven of Blue Foundation’s BE-4 engines, which flew for the primary time previous this month at the debut flight of United Release Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket.That release went neatly, by means of the way in which, although the payload — Astrobotic’s Peregrine moon lander — suffered issues of its personal in deep area and ended up crashing again to Earth.New Glenn has been in construction for greater than a decade. The heavy lifter’s debut used to be at first focused for 2020, but it surely has been driven again more than one instances.The eventual first flight will loft NASA’s two-spacecraft EscaPADE (Break out and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars project. Liftoff is these days scheduled for this coming August.
