\n New Glenn Catastrophe Aftermath: What\u2019s Next for the Space Industry? | Ars Live<\/p>\n
This week Ars hosted a live discussion<\/a> with two space industry experts about the aftermath of the catastrophic explosion<\/a> of the New Glenn rocket in late May.<\/p>\n Along with Ars Technica Space Editor Eric Berger; the director of research at Quilty Space<\/a>, Caleb Henry; and the host of the Main Engine Cut Off podcast<\/a>, Anthony Colangelo, spoke about various topics. Chief among them was the implications of this failure for NASA\u2019s attempt to land humans on the Moon for the Artemis IV mission. Blue Origin and SpaceX are both building landers to support this goal and the rockets to deliver them to the Moon.<\/p>\n During the conversation, Berger reported that the current Blue Origin \u201carchitecture\u201d for a human mission would require four launches of new variant of the New Glenn rocket, known as 9\u00d74, because it has nine first stage engines, and four upper stage engines. This is a more powerful version than the \u201c7\u00d72\u2033 variant that exploded a little more than a month ago. Blue Origin has not set a target date for the 9\u00d74 rocket\u2019s debut, but some sources have indicated the company is targeting late 2027 or early 2028.<\/p>\n How realistic is this, especially after the destruction of Launch Complex 36A? Caleb Henry said he was not optimistic.<\/p>\n I have not seen anyone put out a date for a new rocket, and actually hit it. Going back in the archives, when Blue Origin shifted New Glenn from a three-stage vehicle to a two-stage vehicle, and made a couple other changes in mid-2018 time period, those were stated as being needed to accelerate the path to launch. They had yet to make a first flight, and they were doing these architectural changes so that they could speed up that timeline. I think the 9\u00d74 is really to enable them to do new missions. I think adding engines makes it more complicated, not less. I don\u2019t have a sense of exactly where they\u2019ll land relative to what they\u2019ve put out there, but I think 1.5 is usually a good rule, so a year and a half at least.<\/p>\n Colangelo said it would not surprise him if the development of the 9\u00d74 variant of New Glenn slipped into the 2030s. So if that\u2019s the case, how is NASA going to get its astronauts to the Moon this decade, if that\u2019s to happen at all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Glenn Catastrophe Aftermath: What\u2019s Next for the Space Industry? | Ars Live This week Ars hosted a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-522077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}