The private facet of the race to space has seen some activity lately, and this time, it is Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos’ less-spoken-spoken-about project called ‘Glenn’ under the banner of ‘Blue Origin.’
New Glenn boasts of a capacity to send payloads and people into space. Glenn gets its name from John Glenn, the first astronaut to orbit the Earth. Apparently, the biggest rocket since Saturn V, NASA’s wonder from the 60’s and 70’s, the New Glenn is going to be a monster measuring 23 feet in diameter, and a maximum height of 313 meters. The two upper stages are said to be powerful enough to send the payload and the people much further than the lower orbit of the earth.
Blue Origin was the first company to send a rocket into space (100 km above the surface) and land it back on earth vertically.
Since then it has only been Elon Musk’s SpaceX that has been making news in the field. Apparently, New Glenn has perfected the technology of reusable rockets. Currently, the model of the space industry is governed by the usage of perishable rockets, which increases the expenses by a lot. Most rockets get destroyed with the impact upon landing.
Charles Miller, President of NexGen Space, said, “Reusability is a total game-changer.”
Bezos had said in March that normal people could make trips to space by as early as 2018. Miller also said that he had guessed that the beast would have a maximum of five engines and was surprised to see seven.
The company was officially registered in 2000, but Bezos had not let the media have a peek into it until earlier this year. Last year in September, Bezos had said that the company is going to lease a launch complex at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
This inexpensive dream has been the matter of most importance in the industry, and bodies like NASA have been actively involved with the private sector to make it happen. The cause of the failure of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is not known, yet. However, the loss to Elon Musk’s project was a huge blow to development in the industry. It is likely that a speedy growth rate that has been adopted in the private sector, to become the first one to achieve it, has hampered SpaceX’s mission, but NASA still stands by the company and believes that the mission will be accomplished.
