WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin said on Thursday it will build a bigger, more powerful variant of its New Glenn rocket, drawing early plans for a family of orbital satellite launchers akin to the fleet of Falcon rockets from Elon Musk’s dominant SpaceX.<\/p>\n
The new rocket, announced after New Glenn’s second mission launched last week, will be called New Glenn 9×4, a name referencing nine engines that will power its first stage and four engines on its second stage. That is an increase of two engines for each stage from New Glenn’s current design.<\/p>\n
Sign up here.<\/a><\/p>\n “The next chapter in New Glenn’s roadmap is a new super-heavy class rocket,” Blue Origin said in a statement outlining other rocket upgrades.<\/p>\n The two New Glenn variants, the company said, “will serve the market concurrently, giving customers more launch options for their missions, including mega-constellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome.”<\/p>\n U.S. launch companies Rocket Lab, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, which Boeing and Lockheed Martin owns, are either building or have early plans for larger rockets that can put bigger batches of satellite constellations into space.<\/p>\n Blue Origin spent billions of dollars and roughly a decade developing New Glenn, a 29-story rocket with a reusable first stage meant to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon fleet and more powerful Starship, a fully reusable rocket that remains in development.<\/p>\n Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, posted on X digital renderings of the super-heavy New Glenn standing taller than Saturn V, the 17-story rocket that sent humans to the moon under the U.S. Apollo program. The 9×4 rocket has a larger payload fairing and appears far taller than the original New Glenn design.<\/p>\n Reporting by Joey Roulette Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab<\/a><\/p>\n Purchase Licensing Rights<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n Joey Roulette is a space reporter for Reuters covering the business and politics of the global space industry, often focusing on space power competition and how commercial interests intersect with international relations. He was part of a team that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for Reuters’ coverage of Elon Musk’s business empire. On the space beat for roughly a decade, Joey previously worked for the New York Times, the Verge, and various publications in Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin said on Thursday it will build a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[82495,82496,82497,82519,82499,36586,82500,82795,86846,86847,82530,82531,83787,82529,18,45748,19,82504,82505,17,82565,82524,83788,82508,84337,83810,82511,82512,133,451,82965,82968,82513,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-191293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-aer","9":"tag-aero","10":"tag-aero1","11":"tag-amers","12":"tag-bact","13":"tag-biz","14":"tag-cmpny","15":"tag-cprod","16":"tag-def","17":"tag-defbuy","18":"tag-destocabsm","19":"tag-destousbsm","20":"tag-destousscm","21":"tag-destoustcm","22":"tag-eire","23":"tag-gen","24":"tag-ie","25":"tag-indg","26":"tag-inds","27":"tag-ireland","28":"tag-mtpix","29":"tag-namer","30":"tag-packageus-science","31":"tag-pol","32":"tag-prdlch","33":"tag-privt","34":"tag-sats","35":"tag-sci","36":"tag-science","37":"tag-space","38":"tag-spacem","39":"tag-spc","40":"tag-spex","41":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115583720056195198","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nEditing by Rod Nickel<\/p>\n