Further differentiating the companies, SpaceX began work on steel prototypes almost immediately and successfully built and flew a scrappy pathfinder – powered by an early version of the same Raptor engine meant for Starship – less than a year later. SpaceX thoroughly redesigned its next-generation rocket multiple times before throwing out a large portion of that prior work and settling on an unexpected stainless steel variant that CEO Elon Musk christened Starship in late 2018. Both were massive, meant to be powered by huge new methane/oxygen-fueled engines, and designed from the ground up with some degree of reusability in mind.īut with fairly different designs and wildly different development philosophies, the paths of Blue Origin and SpaceX have only gotten further apart over the last six years. Jeff Bezos publicly revealed New Glenn just a few weeks before CEO Elon Musk’s long-planned September 2016 reveal of SpaceX’s next rocket, then known as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). Much like SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, Blue Origin began work on its semi-reusable New Glenn rocket in the early 2010s. After moving on from the Jacklyn landing ship, it appears Blue Origin is pivoting to very Falcon 9-like operations. It looks like Blue Origin will use the same contractor as SpaceX did to modify a large drone ship for landing its New Glenn rocket's first stage. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s not hard to see why Blue Origin changed its mind. Further, SpaceX has only lost one booster to waves, and it solved that problem by developing a relatively cheap robot. However, after 107 successful SpaceX Falcon booster landings on flat-bottomed barges that are exceptionally sensitive to wave conditions, just a tiny fraction of launches have been delayed by the ocean. Blue Origin had hoped that a large, keeled ship would allow it to launch New Glenn and still recover its expensive booster even if seas were stormy downrange. Now, a few months after a Blue Origin spokesperson first acknowledged that the company was evaluating “ different options” for New Glenn booster recovery, Jacklyn has left Florida’s Port of Pensacola for the Texan Port of Brownsville, where documents show that the ship will be scrapped.Īccording to an unconfirmed report, Blue Origin may ultimately use the same contractors as SpaceX to turn existing barges into ocean-going rocket-landing platforms. Small teams of workers would occasionally work on retrofitting the roll-on/roll-off cargo ship for a future life as a rocket recovery asset but made very little visible progress despite working on Jacklyn for several years. Aside from a flashy, December 2020 re-christening ceremony in which Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos named the vessel Jacklyn after his late mother, the private aerospace company left the ship largely untouched in a Florida port. Known as Stena Freighter at the time of sale, Blue Origin purchased the ship for an undisclosed sum – likely several million dollars – sometime in mid-2018. After four years of halting work, Blue Origin has fully abandoned a transport ship it once intended to convert into a landing platform for its orbital-class New Glenn rocket.
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