Was somewhat surprised to hear that the Blue Ring Pathfinder (their payload) won’t actually separate from the upper stage. So it’ll reenter with the stage as well. I guess they’ll still get to test the radios, solar panels, etc.
Argh, another reset! That’s like the fifth one so far. Back up to 34 minutes. Still plenty of time left in the window, though.
Yeah, I happened to be up and was going to watch it live, but the countdown keeps on doing a freaking Groundhog Day.
Another delay: 38 minutes.
“We displaced a lot of wildlife” isn’t exactly the charming anecdote they seem to think it is.
Ruh-roh. The countdown disappeared completely.
And it’s a scrub.
Everybody scrubs the first time. Right, Jeff?
So are they unloading the fuel?
Almost certainly. New Glenn doesn’t use subcooled propellants like SpaceX, so in principle they could just vent the O2 gas and flare the methane/hydrogen, while keeping it topped off… but in general for any multi-day delay you unload. Certainly if there’s any serious issue to work through that requires vehicle access.
According to sources, the primary problem was likely ice clogging one of the vent lines that carry pressurized gas away from the vehicle. Several attempts were made to melt the ice, but these efforts were not successful, necessitating the scrub…
Additionally there appears to have been a problem with at least one of the auxiliary power units that provide power to the rocket after the engines shut off. One of the primary purposes of these APUs is to power the deployment of landing legs needed to make a soft touchdown on the company’s droneship, Jacklyn
No word yet when the next attempt will be made.
Tuesday Jan 14, same time, according to a post on Xitter which I’m not going to link to. In other words, tonight for those on the west coast. They do say that there’s poor weather forecast for the launch site, so it may scrub.
Confirmed on the Blue Origin website, including the poor weather forecast.
They moved it to Thursday (really Wednesday night):
9:07 p.m. EST / 02:07 UTC
We’re moving our NG-1 launch to no earlier than Thursday, January 16. The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. EST (0600 UTC).
Will Starship Flight 7 beat them? It might!
Starship Flight 7 got delayed as well (due to weather). Blue Origin says that propellant loading is underway for tonight’s flight. No idea why it takes them 4 damn hours. Starship is bigger and only takes about 40 minutes.
Didn’t pay Amazon for express delivery.
Doesn’t New Glenn’s upper stage use liquid hydrogen? Does that contribute to the loading time?
Yeah, it does. I guess the fact that it uses two different propellants probably doesn’t help. But I’m not aware of anything that makes that an inherently slow process. The Space Shuttle took under 2 hours for the hydrogen load, though it was over 5 hours for the whole thing.
The Blue Origin webcast has started, but is only showing the intro screen with a hold at 20:50.
Sounds like weather at the drone ship is an issue.
New launch time: T-30:00.
T-18; and they are talking now.