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Jeff Bezos recently played tour guide for a look inside Blue Origin's factory and the space company's latest rocket, New Glenn.
The billionaire gave YouTuber Tim Dodd, known by his channel moniker "Everyday Astronaut," a tour of the rocket's production facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Standing at over 320 feet tall, New Glenn is one of the largest rockets ever built, according to Blue Origin's website. Only three other rockets have been built taller: SpaceX's Starship, Saturn V, and the Russian N-1, which never successfully launched.
"The scale of things in person is always surprising," Bezos said. "The first time you see a flight article or development article, it's always surprising."
The factory tour was also an opportunity for Bezos to show off his nerdy side. The Amazon cofounder talked excitedly about the intricacies of the technology powering New Glenn.
The rocket, which is set to fly for the first time later this year, is a partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to lift 45 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. By comparison, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can lift nearly 64 metric tons to orbit and is also partially reusable, and the company says Starship will be able to carry 150 metric tons and is designed to be "a fully reusable transportation system."
Bezos showed off New Glenn's Stage One, which is powered by seven BE-4 engines — powerful liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas-fueled combustion engines. He also explained the welding process of the tanks.
"This is a very high-performance way to build the tank," he said. "And especially because it's a reusable vehicle, you get to reuse all that high-performance."
New Glenn is a two-stage rocket — following its launch, Stage One will separate from the Second Stage and autonomously descend back into a landing platform to be reused. Two BE-3U engines will then propel the Second Stage into space to deliver its payload.
Bezos said the vehicle is designed to be turned around in 16 days and last for a minimum of 25 missions.
"I'm hoping it will eventually be much more," Bezos said. "We'd like to get to at least a hundred."
Bezos also talked about his past salvage mission in the Atlantic to recover Project Apollo's Saturn V engines, which powered the Apollo 11 to the moon.
"I was sitting in my living room one day and I said, 'You know, I wonder if you could find those F1 engines from Apollo 11 sitting on the bottom of the Atlantic somewhere,'" Bezos said. "And I went to Google and I typed in Apollo 11 booster impact coordinates. And they popped up."
"And so I thought, this is gonna be the easiest thing I've ever done, I'm gonna go recover those engines. Of course, that was the only part of it that was easy. It turned out to be incredibly hard."
And reusability leads to affordability, which is Bezo's main goal. He said that although manufacturing techniques have been massively improved, most major aspects of rocketry were invented in the 1960s.
"They haven't really changed, so our job today is not to do better than they did at spaceflight. It's to make it more affordable," he said.
Bezos explained the company developed a reusable thermal protection system that doesn't need to be touched up, another aspect of the rocket's operable reusability.
Viewers were also able to see the rocket's hydrogen-powered Upper Stage and its Aft Section, where the seven BE-4 engines are mounted in the base. Bezos additionally took Dodd to its forward section, which has four fins that are the "largest hydraulic actuators on a space aero surface" ever.
"A good aerospace hardware does look like art because you're just going for function," Bezos said. "But there's something when you go for that last 1% of function, it really makes things beautiful."
Bezos wasn't the first billionaire that YouTuber Tim Dodd landed a factory tour with — he's also interviewed Elon Musk multiple times, recently touring SpaceX's new "Starfactory" where its Starship rocket is made.
Correction: August 19, 2024 — An earlier version of this article inaccurately said SpaceX's Falcon Heavy powers Starship. This article has been updated to reflect the two are separate space vehicles.
