Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Company Quietly Prepares To Test Rocket To Rival SpaceX’s Falcon Lineup

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Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, is silently progressing towards the first hot fire test of its New Glenn rocket. Powered by in-house engines, New Glenn is also designed to land on a ship like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. It is also more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse and operational rocket, and footage from media in Florida shows that Blue Origin’s barge came back to port at Cape Canaveral late last night after offshore testing. The return marks another step in the rocket’s test campaign, with a major hot fire of its engines expected to occur soon.

Blue Origin Picks Up The Pace With Its New Glenn Rocket To Compete With SpaceX’s Falcon 9

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket uses seven BE-4 rocket engines to produce 3.8 million pounds of thrust. This is more than twice the thrust of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which uses nine smaller Merlin 1D engines to generate 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket that competes with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which is far more powerful than it and generates 5.1 million pounds through its 27 Merlin 1D engines spread equally across three boosters.

Like the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy’s boosters, the New Glenn’s single booster is also designed to be fully reusable. Blue Origin aims to land it on a barge in the ocean, and ahead of an anticipated hot fire test before the year ends, the firm has finished a round of offshore tests on its barge. As…