Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will not return to flight until January 2027, according to an internal memo from the company's chief executive, Dave Limp, seen by The Register and reported by Richard Speed.
The slip was disclosed in the same week as two hardware announcements, and it overshadowed both.
New Glenn exploded during a ground test in May, extensively damaging its launch pad. A month later Limp said the company still planned to fly again this year, a timetable the space and rocket community treated sceptically given the state of the facility.
In the memo, Limp praised the team's work and then revised the date. "We're proactively updating our anticipated launch date to January 2027," he wrote.
It is a modest slip measured against the damage, but it leaves less room before NASA's planned Artemis III demonstration mission next year, which involves lunar technologies from both Blue Origin and SpaceX.
The first of the week's announcements is GS3, a third stage for New Glenn designed for missions including direct injection into geostationary orbit and Earth-escape trajectories. "GS3 is already under contract for a cislunar mission with a government customer scheduled to launch in 2028," the company said. Blue Origin says the stage is not required for its lunar lander architecture, although it could support sustained operations around the Moon.
The second is Northstar, a booster engine the company says has half the parts and 30 per cent less mass than its BE-4, while raising thrust from 640,000 to 715,000 pounds-force.
Blue Origin says GS3 is designed for direct injection into geostationary orbit and for Earth-escape trajectories, missions that place the heaviest demands on an upper stage. The company has not said when the stage will first fly on New Glenn.
On the cause of May's explosion, the memo says the team had "found and fixed the issue that caused the anomaly", without elaborating. Limp said in August that the problem "originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines" and that existing engines would need retrofitting, but did not explain how the valve failed or what was changed.
The memo added that the company would continue sharing progress updates on Voyager.
Set the three disclosures side by side and a pattern emerges that the memo does not name. The engine gained 75,000 pounds-force of thrust. The launch date moved back two months. Both of those things happened while the rocket was stationary.
This newspaper has looked for the common factor and can find only one. Thrust rose across a period in which nothing flew, and the most recent period in which something did fly produced an explosion and a destroyed pad.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has stated the relationship in the plainest terms the data allow. A stationary New Glenn improves. A moving New Glenn did not.
GS3 sits on the same curve. It is under contract for a mission in 2028, it is built for trajectories that leave Earth entirely, and it is not required by the lunar lander programme it was announced alongside. Its performance is accordingly unconstrained by anything it currently has to do.
Our analysts have drawn the conclusion the figures support and offer it to the company at no charge. New Glenn is gaining roughly 37,500 pounds-force for every month of delay. The optimal launch date is the one after next.