How the Magic Happens
Blue Origin is developing one of the world’s most powerful launch vehicles, the New Glenn. Named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, this rocket is designed to be a heavy-lift workhorse for commercial satellite deployment, national security missions, and the company’s own ambitious plans for space exploration.
But a rocket is only the final product of a vast, complex, and geographically distributed network of infrastructure. This system is a colossal investment in manufacturing, testing, launching, and reusing space hardware. This network spans the entire United States, from the Pacific Northwest to the Space Coast, with critical hubs in America’s “Rocket City” and the high desert of West Texas. This article explores the physical foundation – the factories, test stands, launch pads, and recovery ships – that makes the New Glenn program possible.
The Manufacturing Hub: Florida’s Space Coast
The most visible piece of New Glenn’s infrastructure is its enormous manufacturing complex, located in Exploration Park, just outside the gates of the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This location was not chosen by accident. It places the factory in close proximity to its launch pad, minimizing the logistical challenges of moving hardware that is, in some cases, over 23 feet (7 meters) wide.
The Rocket Factory
The centerpiece is the New Glenn rocket factory. This 750,000-square-foot facility is the heart of the vehicle’s assembly. Its primary purpose is to build the rocket’s largest structures: the first stage, the second stage, and the payload fairings.
The factory was designed from the ground up to support a high launch cadence. This means it’s not a research and development lab but a true production line. Inside, massive, custom-built tools are used to weld, inspect, and integrate the rocket’s components. The scale of these tools is staggering, built to handle the 7-meter diameter of the New Glenn’s tanks and body.
Unlike some other rockets that are built and moved vertically, New Glenn’s stages are built, assembled, and processed horizontally. This approach has several advantages. It allows for easier access to all parts of the rocket during manufacturing, making it simpler for technicians to install wiring, plumbing, and avionics. It also simplifies the building’s infrastructure, as it doesn’t require the same towering high-bay cranes needed for vertical integration, which can be over 30 stories tall.
Inside the factory, robotic welders fuse large sections of metal into the rocket’s propellant tanks. These tanks are designed to hold cryogenic (super-cold) liquid methane and liquid oxygen, the propellants that power the rocket’s engines. After welding, these tanks undergo extensive testing and inspection, including pressurization tests and non-destructive evaluations, to ensure they are flawless and can withstand the extreme forces of launch.
Once the structural components are ready, they move into integration bays. Here, the rocket’s “guts” are installed. This includes the flight computers that act as the rocket’s brain, the navigation systems that steer it, the batteries that power it, and the complex plumbing that feeds the engines.
The Fairing Facility
A distinct, but connected, part of the manufacturing complex is dedicated to the payload fairing. The fairing is the clamshell-like nose cone that protects a satellite during its ascent through the thickest parts of the atmosphere. The New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing is one of the largest in the world, offering a cavernous internal volume for customers.
This large volume is a key selling point. It allows Blue Origin to launch large national security satellites, co-manifest multiple commercial satellites on a single launch, or even deploy large constellations of satellites in one mission, such as those for OneWeb or Telesat.
The fairing manufacturing facility uses advanced composite materials, like carbon fiber, to create the two halves of the shell. These materials must be strong enough to protect the payload from the acoustic energy of launch – which is powerful enough to shatter metal – and the aerodynamic heat of ascent, yet be as lightweight as possible. Creating these structures involves precise, automated fiber placement and curing in massive ovens called autoclaves.
This entire Florida complex, from the main factory to the fairing facility, represents the “assembly” part of the process. The “power” part comes from thousands of miles away.
The Engine Powerhouses: Alabama and Texas
A rocket is just an elaborate tank without its engines. The engines for New Glenn, the BE-4 and the BE-3U, are developed and built at separate, dedicated facilities. These engines are arguably the most complex part of the entire rocket, and Blue Origin has invested heavily in the infrastructure to design, build, and test them.
The company’s engine development is centered in Kent, Washington, near its corporate headquarters. This is where the engineering design and research take place. But the physical manufacturing and testing are handled in the American heartlands of rocketry: Alabama and Texas.
The “Rocket City” Engine Factory
In Huntsville, Alabama – known as “Rocket City” for its decades-long history with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the development of the Saturn V rocket – Blue Origin built its “Blue Engine” factory. This is not a small workshop; it’s a massive, 400,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art production facility dedicated to building the BE-4 and BE-3U engines at scale.
The BE-4 is the engine that powers New Glenn’s first stage. Seven of these engines are clustered at the base of the rocket, and together they generate over 3.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The BE-4 is also a commercial product; United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, selected the BE-4 to power the first stage of its new Vulcan Centaur rocket. This commercial demand means Blue Origin’s Huntsville factory must be a true production line, capable of churning out dozens of engines per year.
The BE-3U is a variant of the BE-3 engine that powers Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket. Two BE-3U engines, optimized for the vacuum of space, will power New Glenn’s second stage.
The Huntsville factory is where raw materials are transformed into incredibly complex turbomachinery. It uses advanced manufacturing techniques, including 3D printing (additive manufacturing) for complex engine parts, automated welding, and meticulous assembly processes. The engines built here are some of the most advanced in the world, burning a combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. This “methalox” propellant combination is considered highly efficient and, importantly for reusability, burns much cleaner than traditional kerosene-based rocket fuel, leaving less “coking” or soot residue. This simplifies the refurbishment process.
The West Texas Test Site
Before an engine can be trusted to power a multi-million-dollar rocket, it must be “hot-fire” tested. This is a violent, dangerous, and incredibly loud process where the engine is strapped to a massive steel and concrete structure, ignited, and run at full power, often for the full duration of a real flight.
Blue Origin’s primary engine test facility is located at its remote West Texas “Launch Site One” near the town of Van Horn, Texas. This sprawling desert property is also where the New Shepard rocket launches its space tourism flights, but a large portion of the site is dedicated to heavy-duty engine testing.
The West Texas site has multiple test cells built to handle the power of the BE-4. These stands are heavily instrumented, with thousands of sensors monitoring every aspect of the engine’s performance – temperatures, pressures, thrust, and vibration. The data gathered here is invaluable for qualifying the engines for flight. Engineers can run an engine through a full-duration burn, shut it down, inspect it, and fire it again, pushing it to its limits to find and fix any weaknesses.
The site includes test stands for single-engine “component” tests, such as firing just the engine’s preburner (a key part of its complex combustion cycle), as well as stands that can test a complete, fully assembled BE-4 engine at its full 550,000 pounds of thrust. The remote location is essential, as it provides a massive safety buffer for these tests.
The Historic Marshall Test Stand
While West Texas handles much of the component and developmental testing, Blue Origin also established a major engine testing presence back in Huntsville. The company entered into an agreement with NASA to refurbish and use the historic Test Stand 4670 at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Test Stand 4670 is a legend in the history of American spaceflight. It was built in the 1960s to test the five F-1 engines of the Saturn V rocket’s first stage – the rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon. It was later modified to test the engines for the Space Shuttle. After the Shuttle program retired, the colossal, 400-foot-tall steel structure sat dormant.
Blue Origin invested significantly to bring this piece of history back to life, modernizing it to test its new methalox engines. Using Test Stand 4670 allows the company to test both the BE-4 and the upper-stage BE-3U engines. Its location, just a short drive from the Huntsville engine factory, creates a streamlined workflow: engines are built at the factory, then transported to the test stand for “acceptance testing” to certify they are flight-ready.
This dual-pronged testing infrastructure in Texas and Alabama gives the company redundancy and high throughput, allowing it to test engines for its own New Glenn rockets and its commercial customers like ULA simultaneously.
The Launch Gateway: Launch Complex 36
Once a New Glenn rocket is built in its Florida factory and its engines are test-proven in Alabama and Texas, all the parts come together at the launch site: Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Like the Marshall test stand, LC-36 is a site steeped in history. From the 1960s to the early 2000s, NASA launched some of its most important early robotic missions from its two pads, 36A and 36B. The Pioneermissions to the outer solar system, the Surveyor landers that scouted the Moon for Apollo, and the Marinerprobes that gave humanity its first close-up views of Mars and Venus all started their journeys at LC-36.
After the Atlas-Centaur rocket was retired, the complex was decommissioned. The old launch towers, iconic “mobile service structures” that were once landmarks on the Florida coast, were demolished. The site sat empty for years.
In 2015, Blue Origin signed a long-term lease for the site, not to refurbish the old pads, but to build something entirely new. The company demolished the remnants of pads 36A and 36B and began construction on a single, massive, modern launch complex designed specifically for New Glenn.
The Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF)
The first stop for the rocket hardware at LC-36 is the Horizontal Integration Facility, or HIF. This large hangar-like building is located near the launch pad. It’s here that the “horizontal integration” philosophy from the factory is completed.
The first stage, second stage, and the payload fairing (with the customer’s satellite already inside) are all transported to the HIF. Inside this controlled, clean-room environment, technicians mate the stages together, connecting the physical structures and the electrical and data lines that run between them. The entire 322-foot-tall rocket is assembled lying on its side on a massive, specialized mobile platform.
This horizontal approach is different from the vertical integration used by rockets like the Space Shuttle or the Delta IV Heavy, which are stacked piece-by-piece on the launch pad. The main advantage of horizontal integration is speed and shelter. The entire rocket can be assembled and checked out in the safety of the HIF, protected from Florida’s often-unpredictable weather. A rocket can be kept in the HIF, fully assembled and ready to go, for weeks. This means that if a launch is scrubbed due to weather, the rocket isn’t left exposed on the pad.
The Transporter Erector and Rollout
When launch day approaches, the massive doors of the HIF open. The New Glenn rocket, still on its mobile platform, is pushed out to the pad by a vehicle called the Transporter Erector (TE).
The TE is a brilliant piece of engineering that serves two purposes. First, it’s the “transporter,” a 2.5-million-pound structure that slowly rolls the rocket on rails from the HIF to the launch mount, a journey that takes about 45 minutes.
Once at the pad, it performs its second, more dramatic function: “erector.” The entire structure, with the rocket attached, is slowly raised from horizontal to vertical using powerful hydraulic systems. This 90-degree lift is a delicate, carefully choreographed operation that places the massive rocket perfectly onto the launch mount. The TE then stays attached to the rocket, serving as the primary umbilical tower. It provides the rocket with power, data, and, most importantly, propellants until the final seconds before liftoff.
The Pad and Support Systems
The launch pad itself is a fortress of concrete and steel, designed to withstand the hellish temperatures and acoustic energy of a launch. At its center is the launch mount, the “stool” that the rocket sits on.
Beneath and around the pad is a complex network of support infrastructure. This includes:
- Propellant Farms: Massive, spherical tanks that store the cryogenic liquid methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (LOX) for the rocket. During fueling, these propellants are pumped through insulated pipes up the Transporter Erector and into the rocket’s tanks.
- The Water Deluge System: This is a critical piece of infrastructure for “sound suppression.” At liftoff, the acoustic energy from the seven BE-4 engines is so intense it could vibrate the rocket and its delicate payload to pieces. To combat this, millions of gallons of water are sprayed onto the launch mount and into the flame trench just before ignition. The water absorbs the sound waves, converting their energy into steam.
- The Flame Trench: This is the massive concrete canyon that directs the fire and exhaust from the engines safely away from the rocket and the pad infrastructure.
- Lightning Towers: Florida is the lightning capital of North America. The launch pad is protected by a series of towering lightning masts that are designed to intercept any strikes and safely channel the electricity into the ground, protecting the rocket and its sensitive electronics.
This entire complex at LC-36 is a symphony of systems, all working together to get the rocket off the ground. But for New Glenn, the mission is only half over at liftoff.
The Recovery System: Landing at Sea
New Glenn’s first stage, the most expensive part of the rocket, is designed to be reusable. The goal is to fly it at least 25 times. To achieve this, the first stage must fly back from the edge of space and land itself. Because New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket launching payloads to high-energy orbits, the booster doesn’t have enough fuel to turn around and fly all the way back to a landing pad on the coast.
Instead, it must land on a moving target in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This requires another, completely different type of infrastructure: a landing platform vessel.
The Landing Ship: Jacklyn
Blue Origin’s landing platform is a massive, converted ship. This Landing Platform Vessel (LPV-1) has been nicknamed Jacklyn. It is a highly modified, 600-foot-long ship that has been retrofitted with an enormous, flat deck. This deck serves as a floating helipad for a 19-story-tall rocket booster.
Before a launch, Jacklyn sails from Port Canaveral and positions itself hundreds of miles downrange in the Atlantic. The ship is not just a passive barge; it’s a dynamic, self-propelled vessel. It’s equipped with powerful thrusters and a sophisticated station-keeping system that allows it to hold its position with remarkable precision, even in rough seas.
This capability is essential. As the New Glenn first stage comes screaming back into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, it uses its GPS and onboard sensors to navigate toward the ship. The ship, in turn, is constantly communicating its exact position, allowing the booster to make fine-tuned adjustments on its way down.
The booster’s final landing burn, using its single center BE-4 engine, slows it from hundreds of miles per hour to a gentle touchdown. It extends a set of four landing legs and settles onto the deck of Jacklyn. The ship’s stable platform is designed to absorb the force of the landing and to handle the “sea state,” or the motion from waves and wind.
The Reusability Cycle: Refurbishment and Relaunch
Landing the booster is a major victory, but it’s only the start of the reusability process. The booster is still a 19-story rocket sitting on a ship in the middle of the ocean. The final, and perhaps most important, piece of New Glenn’s infrastructure is the one that enables the “reuse” part of “reusable rocket.”
The Return to Port
After a successful landing, teams on Jacklyn secure the booster to the deck for its journey home. The ship then begins its multi-day sail back to Port Canaveral. This part of the operation is a race against the corrosive effects of the saltwater environment.
Once the ship arrives at the port, the booster is lifted by a massive crane from the deck of Jacklyn onto a specialized ground transporter. This is the first time the booster has been on land since it launched.
The Refurbishment Facility
From the port, the booster is transported a short distance to its dedicated reusable booster refurbishment facility. This facility, located on the land Blue Origin leased at Cape Canaveral, is another large hangar designed specifically for processing landed boosters.
This facility is the linchpin of the whole economic model for New Glenn. It’s here that the rocket’s reusability is proven, or disproven. Inside, the booster undergoes a detailed, “tip-to-tail” inspection.
Technicians, aided by robotic scanners, examine every inch of the rocket’s structure and its thermal protection system to check for damage from reentry heating. The seven BE-4 engines are the primary focus. They are inspected for wear, and critical components might be swapped out. The methane-based fuel helps, as it leaves the engines relatively clean, but they are still complex machines that have just endured a violent flight and reentry.
The rocket’s avionics, navigation systems, and the hydraulic actuators that control its control fins (the fins that steer the rocket during reentry) are all tested and certified for another flight.
If any repairs are needed, they are made here. The goal is to make this process as much like aircraft maintenance as possible – inspect, service, and refly. The faster and cheaper this “turnaround” process becomes, the more effective New Glenn will be as a commercial launch vehicle.
Once the booster is fully inspected, refurbished, and recertified, it is ready to be moved back to the Horizontal Integration Facility at LC-36. There, it will be mated with a new second stage and a new payload, and the entire cycle will begin again.
Summary
The New Glenn rocket is the product of a massive, distributed, and highly integrated system of infrastructure. It’s a system that begins with engine design in Washington and extends to the high-tech engine factories and historic test stands of Alabama. It relies on the desolate-but-perfect testing environment of West Texas. It all comes together in Florida, in a state-of-the-art factory built on the Space Coast.
This infrastructure flows from the factory to the historic Launch Complex 36, where a rocket is horizontally assembled and rolled to a pad that stands as a monument to both the past and future of spaceflight. From there, the system extends hundreds of miles into the Atlantic Ocean, to a robotic ship waiting to catch a rocket from the sky. And it completes its loop in a dedicated refurbishment center, where the promise of reusability is turned into a practical reality.
This entire network – this nexus of factories, test stands, launch pads, and landing ships – is the physical foundation upon which Blue Origin’s vision for space is being built.
