Following its most recent successful New Glenn mission, Blue Origin is announcing propulsion upgrades to its Star rocket, and plans for a larger “super-heavy class rocket” that puts the company in even closer competition with SpaceX.
Blue Origin says New Glenn will get higher performance engines in both stages, increasing the total thrust of the booster engines from 3.9 million lbf to 4.5 million lbf. Meanwhile, the total thrust of the rocket’s upper stage is going from 320,000 lbf to 400,000 lbf. Paired with a new reusable fairing (the cover that goes over New Glenn’s payload) and “updated low-cost tank design”, Blue Origin claims the advanced rocket will benefit customers going to “low-Earth orbit, the Moon and beyond”.
The company also has another rocket on the roadmap, the New Glenn 9×4, which is the bigger brother of the existing New Glenn 7×2. Named for the number of engines on each stage (nine on the booster stage, four on the upper stage), the New Glenn 9×4 “can carry more than 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, more than 14 metric tons to geosynchronous orbit and more than 20 metric tons for trans-lunar injection,” Blue Origin says. According to an image shared on X by Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, the rocket is even larger than the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission.
This puts Blue Origin in the same size range as SpaceX’s Starship, which successfully deployed its payload for the first time in August, and now faces retirement as SpaceX develops its next-generation model.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are competing to work with NASA on future Moon missions. If Blue Origin’s lunar hunger wasn’t clear from the prominent framing of the Moon in the New Glenn press images, the company is reportedly planning to land its unmanned lunar lander on the Moon in 2026.