Jeff Foust has a story today in IEEE Spectrum on how competition to
commercialise spacecraft that can take payloads, including people,
into Earth orbit and beyond is heating up between Blue Origin and SpaceX.
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Originally Posted by Jeff Foust, IEEE Spectrum
Over the past few years, SpaceX has become one of the most active launch companies on the planet. In 2018 alone, SpaceX performed 20 launches (as of press time), with two more scheduled before the end of the year, representing about 20 percent of roughly 100 worldwide launches.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Jeff Foust, IEEE Spectrum
Blue Origin, by contrast, has yet to launch anything at all into orbit. But the company has similarly big ambitions. It’s working on a rocket it calls New Glenn (named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth), which is scheduled to launch for the first time in 2021. The two-stage rocket will be able to place 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit, with its first stage designed to land on a ship at sea and be reused up to 25 times.
“We’re in build mode right now,” said Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin, during a space policy workshop in Washington, D.C., this past October. The company has completed a new 70,000-square-meter (750,000-square-foot) factory for constructing the rocket just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, and it’s currently building a testing and refurbishment facility nearby, which is expected to be completed in early 2019. Blue Origin is also modifying a dormant launchpad at nearby Cape Canaveral for its operations and has signed up several commercial customers for New Glenn.
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Story here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/...aires-heats-up
