One day, two large rockets: New Glenn and Starship

January 16 2025 saw two test launches of large launch vehicles: The first flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and the seventh flight of SpaceX’s Starship.

New Glenn flight 1

New Glenn ahead of its first flight. Credit: Blue Origin.

This was the first orbital flight attempt by Blue Origin, the first flight of the New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin made the leap from a successful very small, suborbital, rocket, New Shepard, straight into a heavy lift orbital launcher, New Glenn.

Announced in 2015, New Glenn went through a long and careful development period, mostly under wraps, finally getting to the launchpad in December 2024. On its first flight, carrying a Blue Ring prototype (Blue Origin’s satellite bus currently under development), both stages performed perfectly during ascent, successfully placing the payload in Medium Earth Orbit. All 7 BE-4 methane-burning engines in the first stage ran perfectly during ascent, just as in the 2 flights of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, which also has a first stage powered by Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines. The second stage demonstrated for the first time the hydrogen-burning BE-3U engines, derived from the BE-3 engines that have successfully carried New Shepard in 27 flights. This included demonstrating engine startup at zero g (something which cannot be tested on the ground), both after separation from the first stage, and a relight in orbit (a very different thermal environment, on engines that have already been stressed out during the first burn), used to raise the payload from a low to a medium orbit. This demonstrated all the critical capabilities of the rocket for its contracted payloads, including NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars, due to launch in the spring of 2025, and the uses for the Space Force’s NSSL program.

The only part of the New Glenn flight that did not succeed was the landing of the first stage. This very bold attempt for a first flight was always a secondary objective, and Blue Origin was always cautious to inform it was a very risky and uncertain attempt, which would be a great bonus if it worked, but not a critical mission objective. This was expressed in the naming of this first stage: “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance“. For the customers, it is irrelevant what happens to the launcher after it delivers its payload to the intended orbit: reusability only has relevance to the operator, in case it may enable them to save costs for the next launch (whether or not there are savings from reusability being always a very uncertain estimate).

New Glenn’s next launch is nominally expected for March 2025, carrying the first prototype of their Blue Moon lander, in a test flight to Lunar Orbit, in the development for delivering a Blue Moon vehicle to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis V mission in 2029.

Starship flight 7

Later on the same day, SpaceX performed their latest test flight of Starship, the seventh overall, the first one with the V2 version of Starship. The flight was planned to be suborbital, like every Starship flight so far. This flight had the addition of dummy satellite payloads, to demonstrate ejecting them through the ship’s small payload bay doors.

Shortly after the first stage made its landing as intended, despite one engine not relighting for boostback burn, at T+7:39 the on-screen telemetry info showed the second stage’s engines shutting off, one by one, before the stage had reached the intended suborbital velocity. The on-screen telemetry and video were interrupted, followed by SpaceX announcing the second stage was lost. This was followed by airplane flights in the Caribbean, of the coast of Turks and Caicos, being directed to divert or placed on holding patterns to avoid falling debris:

Flight diversions due to Starship debris. Credit: FlightRadar24.

Then, social media started showing a multitude of videos taken from the ground and on flights around Turks and Caicos, showing Starship had an explosion, then the fragments entering the atmosphere:

Just saw the @SpaceX launch from the Disney Treasure!!! @elonmusk @DisneyCruise pic.twitter.com/kkaDk4swBB
— evenstar7479 (@evenstar7479) January 16, 2025

Starship 7 debris over Turks and Caicos pic.twitter.com/EJ3CeMQdmQ
— Nick Pagliuca (@nickpags45) January 16, 2025

After the incident, SpaceX informed “Preliminary indications suggest an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall, which was substantial enough to build pressure beyond the venting capacity.”.

This is the latest in a long series of setbacks in the Starship testing program. Over these 7 flights, it has not yet demonstrated ability to achieve orbit, even with no payload. So far, it has yet to demonstrate several critical milestones:

Prolonged relight of the second stage engines in space. This is necessary before an orbital flight can be attempted, as a Starship that cannot relight its engines for a controlled deorbit would become the largest space debris to make an uncontrolled reentry in history, to end up crashing at a random location on Earth, with potential to cause severe damage.
An orbital flight.
Carrying payloads into orbit, to demonstrate the actual payload capacity.

These are the critical steps for any customer use of the ship. Plus, for the HLS (Human Landing System) vehicle to be provided for NASA’s Artemis III landing on the Moon, which would be derived from Starship, there are several other more difficult milestones:

Placing the fuel depot in orbit.
Docking a Starship to a fuel depot and performing cryogenic propellant transfer on orbit.
Performing multiple fueling transfers to the depot over a short period of time, to get it full before boil off losses are significant.
Launching HLS, docking and refueling from the depot on orbit.
Flying HLS to the Moon.
Uncrewed HLS Moon landing.
Uncrewed HLS Moon takeoff (which would take the astronauts in a crewed mission back to the Orion capsule in orbit).

So far, Artemis III has had to be pushed back twice, due to the uncertainties in the SpaceX HLS and the new EVA suit (contracted to Axiom Aerospace), preventing the mission from even reaching its CDR (Critical Design Review).

Plus, the intended reusability has not been demonstrated:

While the first stage has been recovered, in flights 5 and 7, one was never reused. Only a single Raptor engine (out of the 33 it uses) from flight 5 was reflown, on flight 7. Thus, first stage reusability is still unknown.
No recovery of the second stage has even been attempted so far, making second stage reusability even more uncertain. It is unknown how well it can survive reentry and landing, and its catch fittings (where the tower would hold to it on a landing) have not even been aerodynamically tested in reentry: flight 7 was the first to have fittings, (still non-structural, just for aerodynamic testing), but it did not reach reentry.

This sequence of test flight incidents point to the difficulties brought to the Starship design by intending both stages to be reusable. This means the launch system has to contend with a very high inefficiency of reuse, as every stage to be reused needs to spend a lot of its mass (both inert and propellant) to be recovered. Specifically, for the Starship mission profile, the most significant energy losses would be:

First stage needs to finish relatively early in the flight, so it can reenter at low hypersonic velocity (around 5 thousand km/h).
First stage needs to save a considerable amount of propellant for its 2 burns: boostback (to return to launch site) and landing.
Second stage needs to carry a lot of inert mass to be structurally and thermally capable of surviving reentry at orbital velocities (around 27 thousand km/h). Over the 7 test flights, its mass has grown for more structural integrity and thermal protection, including the addition of an ablative (thus, non-reusable) layer of thermal protection. On the v2 version, it carries more propellant, thus reducing both the mass and volume capacity for payloads.
Second stage needs to save propellant for deorbit burn and landing.
Second stage has shown to have small fairing openings (thus requiring the dispenser for moving satellites out) and trusses intruding in the payload space, due to the structural and thermal needs for reentry.
Reusability generally limits engine thrust, so they will be less stressed on each flight.

All these inefficiencies, whose impact is dependent on lots of model uncertainties, are the reason it is in general difficult to predict if reusability will provide cost savings or not. And, if there will be cost savings, how many reflights are needed before cost savings are realized (to amortize the higher construction cost). The answer depends on many parameters specific to each launch system and its operation, thus there can be no blanket answer as to whether reusability reduces cost or not. Which is why there is currently a multitude of mission strategies across the varied launch systems in use today, each pursuing what was estimated to be the best strategies for their particular set of constraints.

So far, the test flights point to difficulties in achieving high enough thrust from the Raptor engines without failures (most recently indicated by the multiple failures in flight 7, even in the first stage, which had only one used engine and still had one engine failure), and low enough mass, particularly on the second stage, which has received additions to better survive reentry and has not yet successfully carried payloads to space, even in suborbital flights.