Blue Origin announces New Glenn upgrade plans

MUNICH — A week after successfully launching and landing the current version of New Glenn, Blue Origin announced a series of upgrades to the vehicle.

The company said Nov. 20 it plans to increase the thrust of the engines used on New Glenn and make other improvements.

The upgrades include increasing the thrust of the seven BE-4 engines on the rocket’s first stage from a combined 3.9 million pounds-force to 4.5 million pounds-force. The two BE-3U engines on the upper stage will increase their total thrust from 320,000 to 400,000 pounds-force.

“These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low Earth orbit, the moon and beyond,” the company said in its announcement.

Blue Origin plans other improvements as well, ranging from a reusable payload fairing to an updated, less expensive lower tank design and a reusable thermal protection system for the booster.

The company did not disclose a timeline for the upgrades beyond saying they will be phased in starting with the rocket’s next launch, NG-3, scheduled for early next year.

Blue Origin also did not say how the increased thrust and other improvements would affect the vehicle’s payload performance. The company says New Glenn can place up to 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit and 13 metric tons into geostationary transfer orbit, but there has been speculation that the current design falls short of those metrics. Blue Origin did not respond to questions about the current and projected payload capacity.

The company also announced a more ambitious upgrade. The New Glenn 9×4 is a larger version of the rocket with nine BE-4 engines on its first stage and four BE-3U engines on its second stage. It will be taller and feature a payload fairing 8.7 meters in diameter, compared to the 7-meter fairing on the current version, designated New Glenn 7×2.

Blue Origin said New Glenn 9×4 will be able to place more than 70 metric tons into low Earth orbit and more than 20 metric tons on a translunar injection trajectory. The company did not provide a timetable for when the new version will enter service and did not respond to a question about it.

Both versions of New Glenn “will serve the market concurrently, giving customers more launch options for their missions, including megaconstellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome,” the company said.

The announcement comes a week after the successful NG-2 launch, which sent NASA’s ESCAPADE mission on a trajectory to Mars and successfully landed the booster on a ship in the Atlantic.

In an interview the day after NG-2, Blue Origin Chief Executive Dave Limp did not discuss upgrades. Instead, he emphasized the need to scale up launch operations, including production of expendable second stages.

“We want to be very hardware rich next year,” he said, including scaling up to more than 20 second stages a year. “The question is, can we just get to an operational cadence? And to me, that’s the next step that we’re going to have to sit down with the teams about.”

He did not estimate how many New Glenn launches the company is projecting for 2026. “But we’ll launch a bunch of times next year. I’m very confident of that.”