The alternative, he said, was an era of stasis and stagnation on Earth, where we are forced to control the population and limit energy usage per capita. “We can harvest resources from asteroids, from Near-Earth Objects, and harvest solar energy from a much broader surface area – and continue to do amazing things,” he said in 2017. Instead, he wants to see millions of people living and working in space, getting heavy industry and power generation off Earth, so that Earth can be preserved. The point of Blue Origin is to develop "technologies to enable human access to space at a dramatically lower cost and increased reliability," though Bezos has always been very clear that he doesn't think humanity should abandon Earth to go looking for a better home. The name 'Blue Origin' is a reference to planet Earth (Image credit: Harrison H Schmitt (Apollo 17)/NASA) What are Blue Origin's long-term goals?īlue Origin's motto is gradatim ferociter, Latin for 'step by step, ferociously', but a clue to the company's long-term goals is in its name. ![]() The 300-foot-tall, vertical firing test stand 4670 was used by NASA in the 1960s to test the massive Saturn V rockets that took the Apollo spacecraft to the moon, as well as engines for the space shuttle.Ī commitment by the US Air Force to use its super-rocket of the future called New Glenn (see below) means Blue Origin is looking into building a launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.īlue Origin is going large and getting big, though it's got some way to go to reach the size of SpaceX. In April 2019 a deal was signed with NASA to allow Blue Origin to test its BE-3U and BE-4 liquefied natural gas rocket engines at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center also in Huntsville. However, it's now constructing an orbital launch facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, with a rocket construction facility close by, and a $200 million (about £150, AU$300) rocket engine production facility in Huntsville, Alabama. However, its engineers oversee launches from a private suborbital launch and engine test site on Bezos' ranch just north of Van Horn, West Texas. The capsule also touched down as planned, with a soft landing facilitated by the spacecraft’s parachute descent system.Blue Origin’s suborbital launch and engine test site is in West Texas (Image credit: Blue Origin) Where is Blue Origin based?īlue Origin has a new HQ and R&D facility in Kent, Washington. This was the second launch and landing for this particular booster stage. New Shepard returned and touched down without any issue, and in fact showed off one of its smoothest landings yet. The crucial difference between this and an actual passenger flight is that Blue Origin then paused the countdown, and the mock crew disembarked, before the countdown was resumed and the flight proceeded as planned - without any passengers, save for Mannequin Skywalker, the Blue Origin test dummy who flies on these preparation missions to take crucial readings during the launch and return. What that means is that they actually went through the process of flight preparations, including transporting to the pad, and even climbing in to the New Shepard vehicle and getting seated as if they were going along for the ride. This flight was a little different than its usual missions, because it included a rehearsal component with people standing in for what will eventually be Blue Origin’s paying private astronaut customers. The mission profile saw the reusable spacecraft fly to suborbital space, and then return for a parachute-assisted landing at Blue Origin’s launch facility in West Texas. ![]() Blue Origin has launched its New Shepard rocket for the second time this year, and the 15th time overall.
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