Jeff Bezos just had a very good day. After New Glenn’s partially successful debut launch in January, Test Flight 2 hit every target – delivering its customer payloads to orbit and safely returning the first-stage booster for a smooth landing.
Bezos’s Blue Origin is behind New Glenn, an enormous heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket. Standing 98 metres tall with a 7-metre diameter, it’s designed to carry satellites to orbit for Amazon Leo – the newly named Project Kuiper global internet network that will compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. New Glenn will also launch commercial and government payloads.
Following SpaceX’s successes
Like Musk’s ground-breaking Falcon 9 rocket, New Glenn’s first stage (or booster) is designed to return to earth and land on a drone ship. In Blue Origin’s case, this is a huge landing platform called Jacklyn, named after Jeff Bezos’s mother.
The flight profile for the NG-2 launch included launching from Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral in Florida, with a successful ascent through Max Q, where the rocket experiences the most dynamic stresses as it speeds through the atmosphere, and stage separation, where the upper and lower halves separate.
From here, the upper stage continued into orbit, jettisoned its fairings to deliver both of its ESCAPADE payloads into separate trajectories.
Sticking the landing
However, unlike the first test launch, (NG-1) which also successfully launched a test payload to orbit, all eyes were on the return of the booster, as this previously exploded before it could land.
This time, the booster re-oriented itself after stage separation, guided itself back through the atmosphere, deployed its six landing legs, and made a soft touchdown on the drone ship a few hundred kilometres downrange. Once on deck, the legs locked the rocket securely in place, ready for the return trip to port.
Musk’s congratulations
While SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has dominated the market and perfected the ‘return to earth’ reusable technology for its rockets, Elon Musk did have a few kind words to congratulate rival Jeff Bezos’s successful launch.
The space nerds here at GadgetGuy know how hard it is to reach orbit and we wish the entire Blue Origin team a huge congratulations on its success!
The post Musk congratulates Bezos after Blue Origin’s New Glenn aces its test flight appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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