BLUE ORIGIN

Historic Launch Complex 36 is being built from the ground up and we have invested $1 billion in the project. Here’s a first look at the pad – including the “Road to Space” New Glenn will travel on prior to flight.

We use the Tank Cleaning and Testing (TCAT) facility to pressure test and clean New Glenn’s stages before flight. This massive building will be used for the fully reusable first stage which stands tall at 180 feet.

Check out the recent progress at our New Glenn rocket factory at Cape Canaveral. We are testing flight operations with the giant stage 1 simulator, producing flight hardware, and growing the integration and test facilities around the campus.

At our Huntsville, Alabama factory, we built a full-scale pathfinder of our Descent Element lander in preparation for our demonstration mission. This mission will happen a year before landing crew on the Moon. By proving out our technology and pre-positioning equipment, it will start America’s sustainable return to the Moon. To learn more about the Blue Origin-led HLS National Team, visit: www.blueorigin.com/blue-moon/national-team

Blue Origin successfully completed its 14th mission to space and back for the New Shepard program on Thursday, January 14, 2021. Mission NS-14 featured a crew capsule outfitted with astronaut experience upgrades for upcoming flights with astronauts onboard. This flight continued to prove the robustness and stability of the New Shepard system and the BE-3PM liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engine. Also onboard today were more than 50,000 postcards from Blue Origin’s nonprofit Club for the Future. All mission crew supporting this launch exercised strict social distancing and safety measures to mitigate COVID-19 risks to personnel, customers, and surrounding communities. Learn more about this mission on BlueOrigin.com: http://bit.ly/35EJ76D

The Blue Origin-led National Team submitted its Option A proposal to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in partnership with NASA. Blue Origin leads the HLS National Team, which includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper. Together, these partners guided Apollo, established routine orbit cargo transfer, developed today’s only crewed lunar spaceship, and pioneered planetary precision landing with liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen vehicles. During the base period alone, the National Team is completing 25 technical demonstrations and counting, making key progress toward NASA’s mission. Learn more about the technical demonstrations and the approach to get America back to the Moon to stay: https://bit.ly/33UXOl3

On Tuesday, October 13, 2020, Blue Origin launched mission NS-13 to space and back. On this flight, New Shepard flew 12 commercial payloads, including the Deorbit, Descent, and Landing Sensor Demonstration with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate under a Tipping Point partnership. This was the first payload to fly mounted on the exterior of a New Shepard booster, opening the door to a wide range of future high-altitude sensing, sampling, and exposure payloads. Learn more about this mission and the payloads flown on New Shepard on BlueOrigin.com: https://bit.ly/3hVUUkt.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine joined the New Shepard NS-13 webcast to talk about a key experiment on board, the Deorbit, Descent, and Landing Sensor Demonstration with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate under a Tipping Point partnership. Learn more about NS-13 here: https://bit.ly/3hVUUkt.

Blue Origin successfully completed the 13th New Shepard mission on October 13, 2020. New Shepard flew 12 commercial payloads to space on this mission, including the Deorbit, Descent, and Landing Sensor Demonstration with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate under a Tipping Point partnership. This was the first payload to fly mounted on the exterior of a New Shepard booster rather than inside the capsule, opening the door to a wide range of future high-altitude sensing, sampling, and exposure payloads. Also on board were tens of thousands of postcards from students around the world from Blue Origin’s nonprofit, Club for the Future, some of which will include a special NASA Artemis stamp. With this successful mission, New Shepard has flown more than 100 payloads to space across 10 sequential flights. All mission crew supporting this launch exercised strict social distancing and safety measures to mitigate COVID-19 risks to personnel, customers, and surrounding communities. Learn more about this mission and the payloads flown on New Shepard on BlueOrigin.com: https://bit.ly/367AcM3.

The Blue Origin-led Human Landing System (HLS) National Team – comprised of Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper – delivered an engineering mockup of a crew lander vehicle that could take American astronauts to the Moon. The lander is set up in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF), NASA Johnson Space Center’s (JSC) iconic Building 9.  The full-scale engineering mockup showcases two elements of the National Team’s multi-element architecture – the Ascent Element (AE) and Descent Element (DE). Standing at more than 40 feet, it is the Blue Origin National Team’s update to Apollo’s Lunar Module (LM) and will be used to validate the National Team’s approaches for getting crew, equipment, supplies, and samples off and on the vehicle. The team will collaborate with NASA organizations including JSC’s Astronaut Office to perform engineering and crew operations tests with astronauts aiming to fly the final system within several years. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/32ohvAv

The National Team HLS design leverages significant prior work, flight heritage, and a modular solution. Modular solutions help to enable faster progress due to the independent development and testing of each element, which permits ongoing improvements and evolution without impacting the full system.  This also provides flexibility in the use of different launch vehicles and different concepts of operations.   The Descent Element is based on Blue Origin’s Blue Moon cargo lander and BE-7 LOX/hydrogen engine, both in development for more than three years. The Ascent Element incorporates avionics, software, life support hardware, crew interfaces, and mission operations from Lockheed Martin’s human-rated, deep-space Orion vehicle that will fly on the Artemis I and II missions soon. A consistent cockpit experience and training from Orion to the AE makes the end-to-end mission safer for Artemis. The Transfer Element, a propulsive stage that starts the lander on its descent trajectory from lunar orbit, is based on Northrop Grumman's Cygnus vehicle that provides logistics resupply to the International Space Station; and Draper provides descent guidance and avionics to the National Team. It’s time to go back to the Moon – to stay. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/3gcs1iP

We are proudly producing daily deliveries of 3D printed face shield components to help combat the COVID-19 crisis. Our additive machines are working 24/7, and the volunteers for this effort also support BE-4 engine development. We are grateful for their dedication.

Two BE-3U engines will power the upper stage of New Glenn. Fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen – these powerful engines are a variant of the BE-3PM flying today on New Shepard. Here’s a peek at how the test program is going in West Texas. https://www.blueorigin.com/engines/be-3

The largest structure of our New Glenn rocket is the reusable first stage tank. Tank production is well underway in the high bay of our factory in Cape Canaveral, FL.

Here’s an inside look at how a New Glenn 7 meter fairing is designed, and the capabilities it brings to commercial, civil and national security customers. https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn/

2020 is shaping up to be a busy year for the Blue team in Florida – starting with the completion of the first full scale New Glenn 7 meter fairing at our rocket factory in Cape Canaveral. https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn/

Today’s NS-12 mission was a complete success. We moved closer towards verifying New Shepard for human flight. This was the 6th flight for this booster (a record), and the 100th commercial payload customer was on board with thousands of Club for the Future postcards.

For your once in a lifetime journey, you will travel past the boundaries of Earth’s atmosphere into space. Featuring windows that comprise 1/3 of the capsule’s surface structure - the largest windows ever in space – you’ll have a view of the curve of the planet and the vast darkness if the cosmos. Every detail of the capsule has been precision engineered for your safety and comfort. With reclining seats specifically designed to absorb the impact of landing, and an escape motor that can safely propel the capsule from the booster rocket. At the apex of flight, you’ll experience weightlessness. Unbuckling from your seat, you are free to explore different perspectives from each window before your return to earth begins. This is the beginning of a revolution in space travel, and Blue Origin is going to take you there.

On the way to demonstrating the system is ready for human spaceflight, New Shepard has launched nine successful missions with commercial payloads on board from around the globe. New Shepard’s flight profile makes it an ideal platform for microgravity physics, gravitational biology, tech demos, art projects and educational programs. Earth, atmospheric and space science research are all possible on New Shepard.

The Club for the Future is a nonprofit founded by Blue Origin to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and help visualize the future of life in space. www.clubforfuture.org Instagram: @clubforfuture Twitter: @clubforfuture