CAPE CANAVERAL (The Thursday Times) — Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, unveiled a third stage for its New Glenn rocket and a new, more powerful engine on Thursday, on the same day it emerged that the heavy rocket will not fly again until January.
Chief executive Dave Limp told staff in a memo that the next New Glenn launch is now planned for January 2027. The company had been aiming for the end of this year while it rebuilds its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, which was damaged when a New Glenn exploded during a routine engine test on May 28. Limp also blamed bad weather for slowing the rebuild. “Returning New Glenn to flight remains our top priority,” he wrote.
The new stage, called GS3, will be powered by a single BE-7, the engine Blue Origin developed for its Blue Moon lunar lander. The company says it will let New Glenn place satellites directly into geostationary orbit and carry heavy science and exploration missions to the Moon and deep space. An unnamed government customer has already booked a GS3 mission to the space between Earth and the Moon, with launch targeted for 2028.
Blue Origin also announced Northstar, a new first-stage engine that burns liquid methane and oxygen. Compared with the BE-4 that powers New Glenn today, it is 30 per cent lighter, has half as many parts and raises thrust from 640,000 to 715,000 pounds-force, the company said. It went from approval to development testing in 11 months and can be assembled in less than a day. No date has been given for its first flight.
The 98-metre New Glenn has flown three times: in January 2025, in November 2025 and on April 19 this year, when it put AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite into the wrong orbit and the satellite was lost. The flight that was due before May’s explosion was to carry satellites for Amazon Leo, the internet constellation.
Blue Moon and SpaceX’s Starship are the two private vehicles NASA has chosen to land astronauts on the Moon under its Artemis programme.
