Welcome to Rocket Report Issue 9.18! Blue Origin packed a lot of news on a Thursday afternoon with the unveiling of a new launch stage for the New Glenn rocket, a new rocket engine design and the minor and widely expected delay of New Glenn’s return mission from December to January. Reconstruction of Blue Origin’s destroyed launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, continues after a catastrophic explosion nearly six months ago. There is a lot of pent-up demand from NASA, Amazon and the Space Force for Blue Origin to get New Glenn back in action.
As always, we welcome reader contributions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe to us using the box below (the form will not appear in AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report includes information on small, medium and heavy rockets, as well as a brief look at the next three launches on the calendar.
SpaceX veterans are working on water-fed propulsion. Three brothers who worked at SpaceX in the Falcon 9 era are now building satellites that run on water, a potentially recoverable resource on the moon that can be found throughout the solar system, reports Ars. In late 2022, the three Carlisle brothers founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just transportation in space, but also eliminating the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the sky. Argo Space’s satellites will use water not only as fuel, but also as a coolant and radiation protection.
How does this work? …Argo Space flew its first mission in July, but the spacecraft failed after one of its solar arrays failed to deploy and there was not enough time to test the propulsion system. Argo Space has two more missions scheduled for 2027 to demonstrate the company’s water-based engines. The propulsion system is essentially a small rocket that uses hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. However, instead of launching with separate tanks for liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the satellite has a reservoir of liquid water. In space, the vehicle uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases and burn them to produce thrust.
