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Blue Origin unveiled a new kick stage and rocket engine design for New Glenn while confirming that the rocket's return-to-flight mission has slipped from December to January, a delay described as minor and widely expected. The company is still rebuilding its Cape Canaveral launch pad, which was destroyed in an explosion roughly six months ago.
Blue Origin announced a new third stage, GS3, powered by a single BE-7 engine, intended to send satellite constellations to geostationary orbit and support deep-space and lunar missions. The company also revealed Northstar, a methalox first-stage engine producing 715,000 pounds of thrust, which it says is 30% lighter and has 50% fewer parts than its existing BE-4 engine. Blue Origin said an unnamed government customer has already booked a GS3 mission to cislunar space targeted for 2028.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency is speeding up its Artemis program, reaffirming plans to launch Artemis 3 next summer as a docking-practice mission in Earth orbit, with Artemis 4 slated for 2028 to put astronauts back on the lunar surface for a week. NASA has not yet chosen between SpaceX's and Blue Origin's lunar landers for the eventual landing mission. Isaacman said the agency is cutting meetings and bureaucratic delay, citing the Apollo program's rapid pace as a model.
Virgin Galactic unveiled the name of its first next-generation Delta-class suborbital spacecraft, Apeiron, chosen through a public vote. The announcement comes as the US has gone roughly 10 months without a commercial space tourism flight, following the retirement of Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity in mid-2024, the pause of Blue Origin's New Shepard program, and SpaceX winding down its free-flying Crew Dragon missions.
NASA has outlined the sequence for Artemis 3, which will launch three heavy-lift rockets from Florida within about two weeks: Blue Origin's New Glenn carrying a test Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, SLS with the crewed Orion capsule, and SpaceX's Starship version 3. Astronauts aboard Orion will dock with Blue Moon Mark 2 to test its systems before undocking, then briefly dock with Starship to check compatibility, without entering it.
NASA detailed updated plans for returning astronauts to the Moon, confirming changes to how Orion will interact with SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon landers. Orion will now dock with Starship in high-Earth orbit rather than near the Moon, while Blue Origin's plan uses four New Glenn launches without orbital refueling and allows Blue Moon to meet Orion in low-lunar orbit. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency still targets a demonstration mission by summer 2027 and a crewed lunar landing by 2028.
Blue Origin announced a $330 million expansion of its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, set for completion in summer 2027, that will add two launch and landing pads and let it build up to 150 New Glenn upper stages a year. The company is also building a customer integration facility with the U.S. Space Force to prepare multiple missions simultaneously, and says it has now invested over $3 billion across more than 20 Florida sites employing over 5,000 people.
Blue Origin announced a $330 million expansion of its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, adding two launch and landing pads for its New Glenn rocket and boosting upper-stage production capacity to 150 units annually. The expansion, expected to finish by summer 2027, aims to support multiple New Glenn launches per week by the end of the decade, the company said in a blog post from SVP Ian Richardson.
Blue Origin announced plans to add two new launch pads for its New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, on top of two already under construction, along with a new manufacturing facility for up to 150 upper stages of a larger New Glenn variant. The company also plans two additional landing ships to recover first stages, plus a customer integration facility built with the US Space Force featuring four payload bays. Blue Origin says it has invested about $3 billion in Florida infrastructure, employs over 5,000 people there, and works with 500 state-based suppliers.
Blue Origin has revealed a concept called the Power Tower, a 20-meter solar array designed to deploy vertically after landing on the Moon and generate more than 10 kilowatts of electricity. The company says the system targets Moon Base operations near the lunar south pole, the region NASA's Artemis program is focused on, though no flight date has been announced. An animation shows the tower's mast rising and arms unfolding to position solar panels after landing.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the company's first external capital raise has not yet closed and has attracted strong investor demand, calling it "oversubscribed." He spoke at a Washington tech summit, days after the Wall Street Journal reported the company had already raised $10 billion at a $140 billion valuation, with Jeff Bezos contributing $2 billion to the round. Limp did not confirm those figures or say how much Bezos has invested in total since founding the company in 2000.
Seven years after its founding, Starfish Space will send its first Otter spacecraft into orbit next month aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter mission. The demonstration flight, called SSPICY, is being conducted for NASA and will have Otter approach several defunct US-owned satellites to gather data on their spin rates and condition without docking.