Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Meet New Glenn, the Blue Origin Rocket That May Someday Take You to Space - The New York Times

A new chapter in the Bezos/Musk space race

"Blue Origin, the secretive space company created by Jeffrey P. Bezos, offered a look at its newest rocket design on Monday — and, by extension, its ambitions to make space travel more frequent and inexpensive.

Both the rocket and the ambitions appear to be big.

The rockets, named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, are almost as large as the Saturn V rocket that NASA used from 1966 to 1973, before rockets started being built smaller. The two-stage version that could venture to low-Earth orbit will be 270 feet tall, and the three-stage version, which could fly outside Earth’s orbit, will be 313 feet tall. Both will be 23 feet in diameter, packing seven BE-4 engines, which are developed by Blue Origin, and lifting off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust."
Meet New Glenn, the Blue Origin Rocket That May Someday Take You to Space - The New York Times

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