New Glenn Update – Blue Origin
13 comments
·November 20, 2025gangstead
bryanlarsen
Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure.
Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because they expected to increase performance of their engines in the future, making the weight/volume ratio of their fairing more balanced.
New Glenn has 45t of capacity now. Increasing thrust by 15% should increase that to 51t, thus making New Glenn 7x2 also a Super Heavy booster. Perhaps they didn't call that out because that would overshadow the 9x4 announcement.
zaphoyd
Based on the photo posted by the Blue Origin CEO the tanks are definitely getting stretched (also looks like a slightly different fin, landing leg, and fairing config)
DennisP
Yep, 70 tons to LEO is more than the Falcon Heavy.
SilverElfin
For those who aren’t aware, the next flight is to lunar orbit, with a planned landing on the moon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1
sanex
That seems like a big jump between flights. I'm used to the spend and explode fast incremental iterations of SpaceX.
dylan604
Seems BO is taking the NASA approach of not being so cavalier with testing. You can tell people you expect the thing to fail, but repeatedly seeing them fail is still seen as a negative.
ceejayoz
It worked pretty well for F9.
SilverElfin
I was thinking the same thing - big leap. But maybe there’s no real difference between ending up in Earth orbit versus lunar orbit, in that the basic aspects (thrust, staging, navigation, etc) are all there already? But everything relating to the lander (releasing it, landing it) would be new.
toss1
Interesting that "...additional vehicle upgrades include a reusable fairing..."
I wonder how they'll be implementing that since SpaceX gave up on recapturing fairings (seemingly too soon, but only from the POV of someone with no internal info).
ceejayoz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_fairing_recovery_progra...
> SpaceX performs some amount of cleaning and refurbishing before using the previously flown fairings on a subsequent flight. SpaceX has reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with one being reflown for 34 times.
They gave up on catching them in nets, because it turns out they're fine splashing directly into the water.
kanisae
They still recover the fairings. They gave up on trying to catch them out of the air and now just let them land in the water and pick them up.
The incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course. The exciting thing in this announcement is the new 9x4 configuration (9 and 4 engines in the first and second stages vs the current 7x2). They don't mention whether the tanks will get stretched to allow for more fuel, or if this just burns the fuel faster. Starship generations keep getting both more engines and longer.