Abdiel 🚀

New Glenn's second stage on an SLS SRB looks gorgeous and works

Team Blue is building the infrastructure and hardware to meet the mission ahead of us. Take a look at our upper stage manufacturing facility at Rocket Park - it will produce up to 150 upper stages a year to support high launch cadence. This is one piece of a connected system designed to run at rate: manufacturing, integration, launch, recovery, refurbishment, and back to flight. Every step optimized for cadence.

So the post below went a bit viral, and I was tagged on it several times. I'm not posting to disagree, as I write and talk a lot about freeing NASA from external impositions, eliminating needless bureaucracy, empowering our talented workforce, and focusing resources on the objectives NASA was created to achieve. No need to rehash all of that here and make this post excessively long. And of course, SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has enabled NASA to accomplish far more at lower cost, from transporting astronauts to the ISS, to launching Europa Clipper, to the first Moon Base mission set to launch in December. Its ambition to make humanity a spacefaring civilization is exciting and important beyond words. I will just leave you with this: NASA is the world's greatest space agency. We put 12 American heroes on the Moon and brought them home safely, built the Space Shuttle, landed rovers on Mars, launched great observatories like Hubble, James Webb, and now Roman, sent a spacecraft to kiss the Sun's corona, and sent Voyager nearly a light-day from Earth, and she is still going. There is a reason the NASA "meatball" is one of the most recognizable logos on the planet. What our people accomplish inspires generations. Even with the occasional institutional inertia, NASA remains the space agency others aspire to be. We didn't earn that reputation through continuous perfection. We earned it by accomplishing what others thought impossible.

Lots of questions about Never Tell Me the Odds. Alive and well. On the way to the Integration Facility.

Welcome to Rocket Park, home of New Glenn and Lunar Permanence 🚀🌕 This week, we hosted the @NASAArtemis III crew — Astronauts Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade), Luca Parmitano (@astro_luca), Andre Douglas (@Astro_AndreD), Frank Rubio, and backup Bob Hines (@Astro_FarmerBob). The crew got an up-close look at where New Glenn and our lunar landers come to life, then headed to LC-36, where we will launch our MK2 Earth Orbit Rendezvous demonstration vehicle in support of the Artemis III mission.

Mars just got a little closer. Blue Origin is honored to have been selected by @NASA to help build the first dedicated communications network at the Red Planet. Our Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO), built on the Blue Ring platform, will create new pathways for science while delivering multiple payloads to the orbit of Mars, driving discovery today and preparing for the next chapter of human exploration. Learn more: bit.ly/4qSh8sF

Team is moving at record speed out at the pad. Gradatim Ferociter!

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the 13th flight test of Starship!

The B-Test Complex at @NASAStennis helped take Americans to the Moon. Now it will help take us back. We have signed an agreement with @NASA to use the historic facility for New Glenn second stage hotfire testing. Read more: bit.ly/4fiz1g5 📷: NASA

We're not rebuilding the same pad for New Glenn. We're moving to a horizontal/vertical hybrid configuration to get us flying again this year at 36A.  We were already working on something similar for 9x4 at 36B. Let me explain what that means. We mate the stages horizontally in the Integration Facility (IF). Then we bring the integrated vehicle out to the pad, use a crane to perform the vertical breakover, and mate the payload once New Glenn is vertical. This new ConOps has the added benefit of increasing our flight cadence as well.