Blue Origin announces orbital rocket called New Glenn

Text from Jeff Bezos's email:

Our mascot is the tortoise. We paint one on our vehicles after each successful flight. Our motto is “Gradatim Ferociter” – step by step, ferociously. We believe “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” In the long run, deliberate and methodical wins the day, and you do things quickest by never skipping steps. This step-by-step approach is a powerful enabler of boldness and a critical ingredient in achieving the audacious. We’re excited to give you a preview of our next step. One we’ve been working on for four years. Meet New Glenn:

Introducing New Glenn: Reusable, vertical-landing booster, 3.85 million pounds thrust (A high-resolution version of this image is available at www.blueorigin.com/gallery)

Building, flying, landing, and re-flying New Shepard has taught us so much about how to design for practical, operable reusability. And New Glenn incorporates all of those learnings.

Named in honor of John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, New Glenn is 23 feet in diameter and lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. Burning liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen, these are the same BE-4 engines that will power United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket.

The 2-stage New Glenn is 270 feet tall, and its second stage is powered by a single vacuum-optimized BE-4 engine. The 3-stage New Glenn is 313 feet tall. A single vacuum-optimized BE-3 engine, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, powers its third stage. The booster and the second stage are identical in both variants.

We plan to fly New Glenn for the first time before the end of this decade from historic Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space. The 3-stage variant – with its high specific impulse hydrogen upper stage – is capable of flying demanding beyond-LEO missions.

Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step. It won’t be the last of course. Up next on our drawing board: New Armstrong. But that’s a story for the future.

Gradatim Ferociter!

Jeff Bezos

This is quite a beast -- definitely bigger than I'd anticipated, and looks like it's really targeting planetary missions.

Timing seems suspiciously close to Elon Musk's Mars architecture announcement which is apparently planned for the IAC conference in a couple of weeks.

I'm most surprised that they're skipping a smaller orbital rocket before jumping to the massive scale of the New Glenn. Seems that there would be a lot to learn from that as well, with the potential of flying revenue generating payloads to LEO.