Everyday Astronaut's factory tour of Blue Origin

Super cool that Tim Dodd was able to arrange this!

Some highlights and timestamps:

• 2:30: New Shepard measures the wind speed on the way up, and over-corrects such that on descent, the winds blow the booster directly over the landing pad. Any other vehicles that do this?
• 10:00: New Glenn tank production, friction stir welding machines.
• 15:20: They use randomly placed stickers on the barrel sections to do metrology. Not exactly sure how this works. Are they comparing before and after photos?

Upper stage LH2 tank

• 17:30: Orthogrid doubles as slosh baffles. They don't need additional slosh baffles, since hydrogen is so light.

Booster hardware

• Flight hardware for ESCAPADE mission is in production.

• 25:00: New Glenn booster reeentry at Mach 6.

• BO developed thermal protection system, desegned to be reusable from the get go, with little to no refurbishment.

• New Glenn booster turnaround time goal is 16 days.

• I believe the fastest ever Falcon 9 booster turnaround so far is around 21 days.

• Current design is for 25 flights, hoping to increase to 100 in the future.

• 26:00 Landing legs will deploy 14 seconds before touchdown, and take 8 seconds to deploy. 6 seconds to spare.

• The symmetry of 6 landing legs matches symmetry of engine layout.

• New Glenn can hover, and won't need to hoverslam.

• 7 engines on the booster, 4 are fixed, 3 can gimbal.

• 30:00: No RTLS plans at the moment, only droneship landings.

• Very short entry burn or "exo-atmospheric burn", per Jeff.

Blurred tour of the interstage. Such a tease!

Tank production

• 42:30: Milling and bump-forming techniques
• Aluminium lithium alloy, like F9
• Orthogrid like Vulcan
• 44:30: Stage 2 tanks are monocoque, not orthogrid. This is a result of a tradeoff between manufacturing cost and performance, since Stage 1 is reusable and Stage 2 is expendable.
• 46:00: Reusable upper stage? They are setting up an internal "horse race" between "expensive reusable" vs "cheap expendable" upper stages. They will pursue both until it is clear to them which is optimal.

50:00: Goal for engine production rate in 2025 is one engine every 3 days.

Carbon fibre production

• 52:15: Payload adapter
• 53:00: Huge carbon fibre curing ovens
• 54:00: Carbon fibre fairing manufacturing
• 59:00: Four Stage 1 articles currently in production.

BE3U engine discussion

• 1:00:00: BE3U engines in production, including the flight articles for Escapade.
• Discussion on the open engine cycle. High pressure hydrogen used to cool the nozzle is passed through the hydrogen turbine, then through the oxygen turbine.
• The two turbines rotate in opposite directions to squeeze a bit more energy out of the gas flow.
• Turbine exhaust is then used to film-cool the vacuum nozzle skirt extension.
• 445 seconds of ISP.

BE4

• 1:07:00: BE-4 engines.
• Aiming for a "medium-performing variant of a high-performing engine cycle".
• They don't want to stress the engines with high chamber pressures and temperatures.
• Ox-rich staged combustion.
• 340 seconds of ISP.

Other thoughts:

• I'm surprised and pleased at how open and knowledgeable Jeff was. Seems like he might be taking a more active role/interest in the company, which is encouraging to see.
• New Glenn has come a long way from the nearly empty factory just a few years ago. Looking forward to the first launch.

Amazing, I hardly believe Tim was able to land such an in depth look at Blue Origin.

jeff who?