Blue Origin’s powerful New Glenn rocket will be groundbound for at least another couple of months.
Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company had been targeting late spring for the second launch of the 320-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn, which features a reusable first stage. But that’s no longer the plan.
“New Glenn’s second mission will take place NET [no earlier than] August 15th,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Monday (June 9).
“Following in the footsteps of our first booster, we’ve chosen the name ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ for Tail 2,” he added in the post. “One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster. This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We’re on track to produce eight GS2s this year, and the one we’ll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April. Gradatim Ferociter!”
The first New Glenn booster was named “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” a line from the 1994 Jim Carrey movie “Dumb and Dumber.”
The “chance” Blue Origin was referring to was the possibility that the booster would land safely on the company’s drone ship shortly after its Jan. 16 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. That didn’t happen, but the rest of that debut flight went well: New Glenn successfully carried its payload — a test version of Blue Origin’s new Blue Ring spacecraft platform — to Earth orbit.
The GS2s that Limp mentioned are New Glenn upper stages. And the number he cited is meaningful; the company has previously said that it planned to launch eight New Glenn missions this year — a target that is almost certainly out of reach at this point, as Ars Technica’s Eric Berger noted.
“Gradatim ferociter,” by the way, is Blue Origin’s motto. It’s Latin for “Step by step, ferociously.”
Limp’s X post didn’t give a reason for the delay to Aug. 15. And the company still hasn’t announced what New Glenn — which can haul 50 tons (45 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO) — will carry on the test flight.
In February, during a talk at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference in Washington, Limp said that Blue Origin was “still looking for opportunities.”
“If it came to it and we just had to fly a mass simulator, we’ll fly a mass simulator,” he said at the time.
