First Look Inside Blue Origin's New Glenn Factory w/ Jeff Bezos!

- Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to Cape Canaveral, Florida. I'm here at Blue Origin's factory and I'm going to do a world first with you. I'm gonna take you inside their incredible factory. We're gonna see their next vehicle, New Glenn, which is one of the largest rockets ever made. And we're going to see inside of the rocket, and we're gonna see the landing legs, we're gonna see the interstate of the main tanks, the engines, the fairings. We're gonna see everything as it's being assembled for its first launch ever. And stick around

for part two where I'm gonna take you guys out to the launch pad where you're going to see where New Glenn's gonna be launching from. It's incredible. And best of all, we've got a pretty great tour guide, Jeff Bezos. Let's get started. Hello. Hey. Hey. How you doing, Jeff? I'm doing alright. Hey, I'm Tim. Tim, Jeff. So nice to meet you. Welcome to Blue. Thank you. I really, I mean, what a, what a grand entrance to here. Oh - Yeah. Brings back incredible memories. - Yeah, of course. I'm sure, I'm sure. What a remind me

is this the, this is the first one you guys landed, if I recall right? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Yep. Yeah, - But I think this one's flown five times, six times. I can't remember. - Yeah, it was a handful of times, which is crazy. And now it's just a, a, a lobby decoration and - Yeah. And of course it fits easily inside of New Glenn's fairing. So - That's the craziest thing about it. That's insane to think about. 'cause No, it's, I don't think people understand the scale even though this is a relatively

small rocket. I mean, it's still huge. Yeah, that's right. It's still huge. And we're what, four stories here? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. - It's, it's a very, like the, the ring fan, even there are a lot. This is, it's a very clever design. This vehicle is very unusual. 'cause it has to fly in two directions. Yeah. It flies up and it flies down. And it has to be aerodynamically stable with both ways. And so that ring fin is a clever part of that because it's shielded on the way up - Yep. - By the crew capsule.

Yeah. And when the crew capsule separates that re fin becomes a descent only aerodynamic feature. Yeah. - Yeah. So, and then also you have, 'cause you have the popup fins at the top of the ring that pop out. Okay. We've got - That's for additional reentry stabilization. Then there also are drag brakes Yep. That basically are there to increase the, you know, to make the ballistic coefficient better for, for the propulsive landing. Right. Right. So it makes our terminal velocity lower, much lower. Yeah. - Yeah. And then these are the, this is for steering. Yeah.

So, you know, you go up And we actually, we do something very unusual on the way up, we measure using just inertial navigation. And, and so we can measure the high altitude winds just by how the, we know how we're steering the vehicle. Yeah. And we know where the vehicle's actually going. And so we can impute the high altitude winds and then we adjust for those on ascent so that when we come down, the high altitude winds will blow us directly over the landing pad. No way. - And then, and that corrects most of the

error, But then the remaining error gets corrected by these fins so that we can fly over the landing pad. Yeah. And then the, the final error gets corrected by the, you know, terminal descent maneuver. So anyway, there's a lot going on. The fact that something like this lands propulsively proves that math works. Yeah. Do you wanna go in? I do. I do. But I have to check out. I I, I try to save it. 'cause I saw it over here and I see the words X 33 and I have to have you, there's, show me

what this, - There are so many objects. I don't know if you've ever been to our Kent facility. - It's been about five years. Yeah. But I have been out there. Yeah. - Well, you know, as you can tell, this is a, this is one of their umbilical panels. And so it's just, I, we have objects like this all over Blue Origin. It's kind of inspiring just to see what others did and, you know, how they made things. What did, if you ever look at some of the, you know, a lot of the, a lot

of rocketry was figured out in the sixties. Right. We've improved manufacturing techniques. We've improved sensors and computation. They wouldn't even recognize what we can do with flight computers and sensors. And so they'd be blown away by that. Yeah. Yeah. But the big things about rocketry, regenerative cooling, common bulkheads, you know, all these things they invented Right. Are, you know, they haven't really changed. They haven't really changed. They haven't changed. So our job today is not to do better than they did at spaceflight. It's to make it more affordable. So, you know, spaceflight was has been

a solved problem for a long time. Right. The thing that's not solved is making it low cost. - Right. Interesting. And, you know, that's about reusability and manufacturing techniques and other things. - Yeah. Yeah. It's just, I, yeah. - I know, man, you're a buff. Yeah, exactly. - You're a space buff. - When I, when I walk in and see a X-33 umbilical, I'm like, okay, this is cool. This is really cool. Well, sometime - You'll have to get a tour of, of our, our Kent headquarters too. And you'll see there's lots - Of, lots

of cool artifacts around from the old days before - We go mic on Jeff. - Yeah. You, I think I recognize those. The, - I I think you, of all people recognized, I think, - I think I pulled one of these up off the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, actually. - That is the craziest thing anyone can say. Genuinely. - In the Smithsonian now. Yes. And so it's an Apollo 11 and F1 engine. 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. And I went to Google and I typed in Apollo 11 booster impact coordinates. And they popped up. They had radar tracked it all the way to impact. Right. 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. We did side scanning sonar first, and we located, the problem is we located too many objects. Really? So it's

like NASA's graveyard out there, like, you know, all this stuff that flew out there. Most of it, there's like a big 30 mile long pretty similar corridor there. - Yeah. Very similar corridor. And so we found some things that we thought were very likely, And then we had to go investigate them. So we put together a big mission with remotely operated vehicles with like high def cameras. And it's in 14,000 feet of water, 7,000 PSI. So everything you do in those environments is very difficult. But it was actually incredibly fun. I brought my mom and

my dad and my brother and my brother-in-Law. And, and my mom, there was 60 people on the boat where we recovered the engines and there were 59 men and one woman, my mom. - That's awesome. So anyway, it took, it took a full month. We were out at sea for almost, for like 28 days Wow. And pulled up those engines. And that now that Apollo 11 F1 engine that actually flew the men to the moon is literally in the Smithsonian is result - Of that. That is the cool. And when you, that's stuff that I

don't think people even appreciate. Like, I, I barely know that story and I'm pretty- - I don't think many people know that story. - I mean, you, you literally went, you should - Go go to the Smithsonian and see it. It's an incredible artifact. Did you used to have it at the Air and Space in Seattle? - I also pulled up a second engine in, it turns out to be from Apollo 13. That one is in Seattle. Oh. So the Apollo 11 one is in the Smithsonian, and it just went on display about a year

ago. You know, they've been refurbishing the Air and Space Museum. Yes. And so it's, it's there now. It's part of the permanent collection now. It's really cool. It's next to, they've done a really nice job because they've set it up next to an unflown F1. Oh, cool. So you can see, you know, the actual article and an unflown one in pristine condition because of course, you know, after many decades on the bottom of the ocean, it's eroded and You know, it impacted the ocean at high speed. Right. It got crushed. Yeah. There's all kind the,

you know, the, the, the bell, the, the nozzle is very fragile. Right. So, you know, it's - Just, it's paper thin, - Relatively thin tube. I mean, it's these tiny little tubes all braise together. I mean, it's a work of art by the way. It is. - Yeah. Anyway, you wanna go inside? Yeah. - We better see what you guys are looking at. Yeah. That is so - Cool. It's fun to pick up engines off the bottom of the Atlantic, but it's even more fun to build rockets - Build up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't

think too many people can say that either. Yeah. What'd you do on holiday? "I, well, you know, went out And grabbed some engines that took us to the moon." - All right. - Okay. - So I'm gonna take you on a little tour and, and you know, feel free to ask questions along the way. Let's go, I'll start. We'll start down here and I'll show you some of how we make the tanks. Okay. And then we'll just, we'll just wander around. Oh, hey, I gotta, I gotta just scope this already. We'll come back here too.

We'll come back. Okay. But - Yeah, but, but feel free. Oh, it's huge. - Yeah. You know, you see pictures and- - It's hard to tell the scale of things in person is always surprising. Yeah. And the first time you see a flight article or development article, it's always surprising. You know, you see it in CAD and it always looks the same size. Yeah. It's always the size of your computer screen. - Exactly. And I think people just, you know, even when you see a picture of like a factory floor, you don't have a normal

scale of reference To the size of the factory even. No. So your eyes just don't quite click on, on how big things truly are. When you say it's seven meters in diameter. What's that? That doesn't translate. You know, - We can go this way. We'll walk, we'll do the narrow path. This is where we make the tanks. Okay. And that probably obvious from casual inspection, but- - Geez, - Watch these little things. Wow. You can see Inside here you can see the ortho grid. Yep. Geez. This is a GS1, Glenn Stage One. The booster stage.

This is an LNG tank. Okay. For the booster. Okay. And actually this outlet that you see here is, this is the common dome. Okay. So this dome separates the LNG from the LOx. Yep. This is the down comer. Okay. So the LNG comes down through the LOx tank. Yep. So what's about to happen is that the first Barrel section of the LOx tank is about to be friction stir welded onto this. So the common dome just got, you know, we just finished friction stir welding that in. That's the friction stir welding head over there. This

rotates at a certain rate, you know, you develop weld schedules and so on. And this, the domes are the, the inner part where, see the isogrid that is spun formed. And then these gore panels are friction stir welded on to increase the diameter of the dome. And so anyway, This is a very high performance way to build the tank. And especially because it's a reusable vehicle, you get to reuse all that high performance. You're not building this incredibly high performing thing and then throwing it away. Throw it away to be recovered on the ocean by

someone 50 years later. Exactly. Perfect. - Well that's what's so cool. I mean, you can tell just you guys are obviously, I mean, this is at a very finished standpoint. I mean, even your, what the down comers put into looks like a piece of art. I mean, - It's, it all it, a good aerospace hardware does look like art. Like art. Yeah. Because it's, so you're just going for function. Right. But there's something about when you go for that last 1% of function, it really makes things beautiful. - Yeah. Geometry is kind - Of, yes.

Highly engineered objects always end up looking beautiful. - Yeah. Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool. So and so, so that's gonna be Friction star welded onto the top of the Lox tank here. - Yeah. So this is about, this is, you know, you can see they're rigging this, you can see it's getting rigged right now to be lifted up. It'll be moved over here and then it gets, you know, press up against this. Yeah. - We'll, - We'll trim it to get the fit exactly right. Make sure they're completely parallel. And then once they're

trimmed and in location clamped together, then that friction stir welding head will do its thing. Yeah. And then, then it'll be, you know, in NDT inspected to make sure that weld is good and then goes on to the next step. And then you just keep adding the rings to, to it like that. You just keep adding barrel sections. Okay. And so the barrel section here, we can walk over there. The barrel sections are made over here. So this is where the vertical welds are done. We have two of these stations. There's one down there too.

Okay. But these are where the vertical welds are done. So each of these panels is made, we'll go in the next room, I can show you where the panels are made. But each of these panels are milled and then bump formed. And then they're welded together vertically like this. And then they're attached to each other horizontally over here. Okay. - So the, I know there's kind of the isogrid on the inside of the top of this just - To be, technically that's orthogrid. Orthogrid. The isogrid is the one that is triangles. Right? Right. The -

Orthogrid is rectangles, is orthogrid. And the orthogrid is way better if you can get away with it Because the orthogrid is easier to mill, much cheaper. And also you can bump form orthogrid. You can, I'll show you the, i'll, I can show you in the other room. Isogrid, you really have to, you have to mill it with like a five axis machine after it's already been formed. Okay. You can't really bump form isogrid. Right. - Right. Yeah. - Now, but the advantage of isogrid is it's very high performing. Especially if you're taking loads in every

direction in all directions. Yeah. Makes sense. This is, this is a huge building in general too. Like - This is, oh, this is a huge building. This is massive. You see it from the road when you're going to like the visitor center and stuff, which is actually really cool when you're, it's really cool when the public can just drive right by and see it. We're - Like right next to the visitor center. I love it. Yeah. - But then when you're inside it, it's another, another thing altogether. - This is where we're, you know, where

we weld on the, The, the gore panels to the spun dome. Oh, okay. - You can see it happening here too. Yep. Wow. All these little, by the way, all these little markers - Yep. - Lets you do metrology. So you can, there's, you can use the machine vision to, it just looks at this and because it has all these little markers on it, it can look at the, you can use machine vision technology to look at these parts and just make sure they're right. - So it's like a QR code for every piece. I

mean, they're not you, by the way, these are not put on carefully. You can put these stickers everywhere. You know, you don't have to put 'em on very, very carefully. You can just put 'em anywhere. In fact, you're counting on some randomization so that the machine vision can look at it. Oh. - And just, oh. And it just catalogs it at the beginning. It just looks at it and it knows whether it can see where each of those dots is. And then it could just tell you every one of those dots, You can go look

at the CAD and you can see is this dot, does it match what the CAD says it should be? - Wait, so are they just physically put on, like they're - Stickers, they're decal, they're little tiny decals. No. And it doesn't matter where you put them. Do those have to have to have remove before flight? Not necessarily. - Depends on what, what the next processing step is. You know, in our case, we're putting thermal protection over this. Right. It's kind of it, I don't know if we remove them or not. Actually. We can find out.

- For some reason the idea of just throwing stickers on the- Isn't that cool? It's just random and cool. It's such a clever, clever way to do it. Alright, I'm gonna give you a real treat now. We're gonna go up. Oh, let you, I'm gonna let you look inside of a hydrogen tank. Oh, yes. So this is a GS2, second stage. Okay. This is a GS2 hydrogen tank. Okay. And so we're gonna go up these stairs and it's- What we're doing right now is we're installing the helium bottles Yep. Inside the hydrogen tank. Cool. So

you can come look. Oh, awesome. We might have to put some bunny suits on. Okay. Hey guys, sir, So we've got a little airlock here, clean room. We wanna keep the inside of the tank clean. And we're just going to, we'll get, we'll put a little suit on. We'll be able to go inside the airlock, and then you can poke your head in. Cool. And what you'll see in there is some of the, you'll see the whole tank. A lot of it is covered up in plastic, but you'll still be able to see. And then

the, and, and you'll see the cryo helium bottles. Cool. Yeah. - I think this is only the second or third time I've ever actually put on a full bunny suit. - If you wanna take a seat, that might make it easier. - I think I'm already in You're good. I'm a pro for those, those previous experiences. - Very coordinated over there, Tim. Okay. Not many people have seen inside a big LH2 tank. - I know. And it's a, it's a big one when you think about it. It is. The only LH2 you tank that has

ever been bigger is the S-IIB on the Saturn V. - That's right. And, and it doesn't go to space. Right. It doesn't go into orbit. - Into orbit. Yeah. So, yeah. And even when you think about the S-IVB, that's only, What was that six? That might have been seven meters in diameter. But this is a much larger stage than the S-IVB though. - Yes. All right. As we walk in, I'll do you Yeah, I'll make sure. - Just step on the mat. Okay. - You can walk in. - Thank you. Holy crap. - Watch your

eyes. - It'll be bright. All right. It'll be bright. We're gonna, I'll look away from the light. Whoa. That is sick. Could have to this light. Yeah. You could have to eclipse it. Yeah. - I think I might have a better view over here. Come over here. Okay. Up on the upper left. Oh, right. Do you see the helium bottles? - Yeah. - Oh, you want me to kind of, - Yep, we got it. You got it? Yep. That is, so you got four there, two more down here on the bottom. - Yeah. And I

mean, basically they don't go all the way around, but there, there's a, a number of 'em still to be installed. - And so they just climbed out the ladder there - And you can see the orthogrid. - That is awesome. And so this is the, is this the top here then? This is the - Yes. And that is the, and then below here would be the Ox tank. Okay. So when it's ascending at least, well, I guess it Yeah. As it's under acceleration, the liquid, the, the bottles will stay as much in the liquid propelling

as possible. Yes, correct. Oh yeah, that's, I think that's better. - Wow. That's a little better. So we got the whole bulkhead here that we're poking our head into. And then the on top of this will be all the, the, like the fairing adapter and the payload adapter will sit on top of, basically on top of this right here. - Exactly. - And then are there will slosh baffles, do they have to be- - Yes. Built in here too? There are some, there are some baffles too. I'm not the, but you have to remember the

isogrid does a Lot of that job for you. So the baffles are actually more important on the LOx side because there's, the locks is so much denser. Oh, right. Remember LH2, liquid hydrogen is so, you know, light - So a cubic foot of liquid hydrogen only weighs 4.4 pounds. Oh my gosh. Yeah. A cubic foot of liquid hydrogen only weighs 4.4 pounds. That's crazy. So, you know, a cubic foot of water or LOx probably weighs 60 plus pounds. - Right. - So, you know, you pick up a big bucket. Right. Picture a bucket that's like

a cubic foot size bucket. Right. It's heavy. It's - Heavy. Yeah. - And you know, you pick up a bucket full of liquid hydrogen or the same size, it's incredibly light. That's crazy. And so slosh with liquid hydrogen is not a very major, it's not a major issue. Yeah. It doesn't have as much, you worry about other things. Like you don't want, you know, you worry about utilization. So if you have, you need to make sure that you are, you know What, where you're the sump, where you're, you collecting the last bit of liquid hydrogen.

Oh yeah. You don't want slosh down there. Right. Because you might, it might start testing, suck a bubble. Yeah. And so, which would, you know, you wouldn't be able to get good utilization if you, if you had that issue. Yeah. So you do have to design certain features to make sure you can get great utilization. Yep. But typically with LH2 slosh is not an issue. - That's crazy. - Wow. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, - Thank you. It was awesome. That was great. - That's a, that's a, that's a good ride right there.

Thank you. - You have a good one. Thank you. - We can keep heading this way. - Cool. And I'm already seeing the aft end. This is second stage, right? That's right. So this is, this is, this is actually the flight article. Oh. This is the second stage that will take Escapade to space a little later this year. No way. That is awesome. So this is, that's your first orbital second stage right there. That's it. - That's it. And in fact, the engines are, the flight engines are in this building. I'll show them to you

a little bit later. Yes. You can see, we saw, you saw as you came in, that's the flight article for the aft section of GS1. So that's the aft section of the booster. Wow. The engines get mounted. Seven BE4 engines get mounted in the base. - Geez. - Oh, that's, yeah. The inner stage there. Right. - This is the forward section of GS1. So the on top of that- Sorry, the forward section of GS1 of the booster. Okay. So basically that's the bottom of the booster. Yep, yep. That's the top of the booster. - And

in between is basically the big tank, the big GS1 tank. And I'll show you the flight article of that too. It's in a different building. Okay, cool. But, - So, but these are flight articles. These are, these are mission one flight articles. Wow. And what you see that the, the fabric covering is our thermal insulation. Oh, cool. So we developed that ourselves and it's highly reusable. It's been tested on New Shepherd. This vehicle comes in at Mach 6 and goes through some quite extreme heating environments. We have, we have developed painstakingly a very capable, reusable

thermal protection system That doesn't need to be touched up. So we're really excited about that. It's part of that path to reusability, not just reusability, but operable reusability. Right, right. It's through low inspection, fast turnaround. This vehicle is designed to be turned around in 16 days. Really? 16 days. - Oh my gosh. That would be game changing. - That's what, that's the design. Wow. And, and designed to last for a minimum of 25 missions. Wow. So I'm hoping it, it will eventually be much more, we'd like to get to at least a hundred, But starting

with a design for 25. So, wow. You know, we can go. - So that finish is what we're gonna see. Like that's, or it, does it get painted over that? - It might, it, it could, it'll be painted. But that is the, that is is the actual thermal material. that's the thermal material. So we, they're doing hydraulic testing right now, so we can't get too close. But this is, we can still look at things pretty well from here. You see the landing gear, there are six landing gear. Yep. And you can see the landing gear

doors. The landing gear deploy starting 14 seconds from landing, they deploy, takes them eight seconds to deploy. Okay. So they're fully deployed six seconds before landing. Okay. The deployment is gravity assisted because you're decelerating. Yep. So you've got good gravity assist on the gear deployment. There's a lot of effort that goes into making landing gear lightweight, you know, it's, it's parasitic mass. Right. Relative to an expendable vehicle. Yep. So this, we've learned a lot about this from New Shepherd, and we're able to take those lessons and put it in here. So the six landing gear

in between about four and six landing gear. Your mass trade is kind of, even when you have more landing gear, your splay can be smaller to get the same tip over. Yep. So if you, you're designing for a, you know, a certain probability of tip over, and if you have, let's say, let's say take the extreme case, you have three landing gear, then they need to be, to get the same probability of tip over, you need To have very big landing gear. Yeah. They have very wide split. Yep. If you have four, they can come

in a little. Yep. If you have five, they can come in a little more. Right. Six, they come in a little more. Interesting. So you're trading that, in our case we like six because geometrically it fits really well with a seven engine configuration. Yes. Yep. So you've got a landing gear between every engine. Yep. You, you've got the center engine and you've got a ring of six. Yep. And you can, they, it just, it just packages. Well, well, makes complete sense. Anyway, the aft section is really interesting. So the engines fit up inside there, and

then there's a heat shield that where each engine has its own eyeball seal. Same technique we use on New Shepherd. - And now when the legs are gonna be fully deployed at about six seconds before landing. Are we expecting to see New Glenn kinda hover in a similar manner to New Shepherd or- Yes. And then kind of hone it into the last second? We can do sustained thrust to weight equals one. Okay. So the engines, they can throttle, the BE4 engine can throttle down to 40%. Yep. And the, so the final landing maneuver can be

done at, you know, a constant descent velocity. Right. Which is what New Shepherd does. - Yes. And it's, and then if you think about it, and the total throttle scheme, if you have seven, You're already dividing by seven and then 40% of that. So you're really down to like- - So there are three gimbling engines on this vehicle and four fixed engines that don't gimbal. Interesting. - So there's a line of three engines. Yep. For the return, we light the three gimballing engines to do the full deceleration. Okay. And then we do the final landing

on a single engine. - Okay. Cool. - So the vehicle, as you know, with this is so light, it starts out very heavy, right? Yes. Because it's got, you know, millions of pounds of fuel and oxidizer on board. Right. - Right. - It's really heavy. It's really heavy. By the time you land, it's really light. Yeah. And so, you know, the, the dry mass of this whole vehicle is only a few hundred thousand pounds. Right. You've already gotten rid of the payload. Yep. You've gotten rid of the second stage and you've gotten rid of all

the fuel. Yeah. So you actually have a very light vehicle that needs to land. And actually it's, you know, so you need to go down to just a single engine Yep. And then throttle that engine to get to thrust weight equals one, but it gives you a lot of control authority on the landing. Right, - Right. And are you doing a, so you're, you're doing it always a downstage landing. You're gonna be landing on- We're gonna always land on a floating platform down range. Okay. We're not doing any return to launch site. We might do

that later, but it's a very big performance penalty. Yeah. And if you are, but, which is, but it's still a smart thing to do if you have a particular mission. Doesn't need the performance. And so initially we're not gonna do that. We're gonna do all of our missions down range on a floating platform. But maybe we will do later, we may do some missions with return to launch site if it makes economic sense. Right. - Do you have to do an entry burn as you're- - We do an exoatmospheric deceleration burn. Okay. And then we

do a final landing burn. Yep. The exoatmospheric deceleration burn is actually very short. And we get, so we have big strakes on our vehicle. And so the vehicle's ballistic coefficient is such that, including the strakes, allows us to be very fuel efficient. And so we did this, we kept doing these trades and the strakes always wanted to be bigger. Oh yeah. Because the landing propellant is so heavy. Right. Right. And so anything you can do to reduce that length of the exoatmospheric burn. Right. Turns out to be a winner. Turns out to win out to,

to a point. Right. And then at a certain point you reach an optima. Right. And so you'll see I you'll see the, one of the strakes later. Yeah. On the mid, on the mid stage, on the mid module. But anyway, it's a very, it's a very cool design. We're close. We need to understand our heating environments better, which we'll start to do after the first flight. Yep. We wanna learn whatever you can learn on the ground through simulation and ground test you wanna learn, But there's some things you can only learn in flight. Right. And

the final environments is one of those things. Yeah. So in the beginning you have to estimate your flight environments; noise, heating, entry rates, et cetera, et cetera. You can do a pretty good job with simulation, today, couldn't do that in the sixties. Right. So there are some things that have gotten better. Yeah. A hundred percent. You know, CFD is one of them. Yeah. - Jeez. Monte Carlo. - Oh, everything, anything that involves computation has gotten way better. Yeah. So you can do a very good job, but then, but you have to have, you have air

bounds. You basically have to design the vehicle for the conservative side of those air bounds. And then once you fly you can go tighten up and anchor your models, tighten things back up. Yeah. And so we'll be able to see after the first flight, how, you know, where you came in at kind of, and where, how long is that exoatmoshperic burn have to be. Cool. Does it even have to happen? Cool. Can we change the thermal protection system a little to get rid of it all together? Yeah. 'cause it will always be a performance improvement

to get rid of that burn, if you can. That's cool. - Let's see. Let's keep walking. Yeah. I take you over to the forward. - Oh, I, the one's completely cantered. It can swivel 90 degrees if it needs to - The fin or is that just for- - The operating range is 60 degrees. - 60 degrees. Okay. So that's just Probably installation there or something. - Yeah. The operating is 60 degrees, - Which is a lot for a control surface. And these fins move fast. Really? They're, these are the, these are the largest hydraulic actuators

on a space aero surface probably I think ever. They're five times bigger. I, I'll show them to you when we get inside. They're five times bigger than the actuators used on the Shuttle SRB thrust vector control system. Really? Yeah. They're giant. Well, because you really wanna be, you need a lot of torque because you, you want to be able to move them very quickly. Yeah. These fins book and you don't want the aerodynamic forces to be moving though, you know, they're gonna be reacting against those fins. The last thing you want is for those to

torque one out of alignment. Oh, this is awesome. We'll keep going up. I can point a few things out for you if you want. Holy crap. - So flight computers. - Yep. - Oh, everything is one fault operative on New Glenn. Okay. - You have some redundancy. - We have redundancy. so the big fins, that's the pivot point. - Wow. - So that's the, the fin, the torque box. This is the pivot point. - Wow. - We come up a little further. Here's another. So now we're up above, That's the pivot point down there. Yep.

This is the, that's the hydraulic actuator. Geez. That rotates the fin. - Steers the fins. That steers the fin. Wow. Isn't that incredible? - That's insane. - That's big. - It's really big. Wow. And so there are, there are four of those. Four of 'em. Yeah. That is crazy. And these are our nitrogen Or hydrogen bottles there for the, for pressure and probably for RCS and That's exactly right. These are nitrogen bottles. These are nitrogen pressure in bottles. So where we are standing, these are the RCS. Oh, cool. - Okay. Where we are standing above

us will be the second stage. - Second stage. - And this space is mostly hollow because the giant space nozzles for the BE3U engines fit in here, - Fit right there. That is crazy. Wow. It gives you a sense of the scale of like Yeah. You know, when we're standing here and yet the nozzle's gonna be, you know, - Yes. Basically the engines are right here. - Yeah. Yeah. The heart of the engine's right here and the nozzles that right down - There, that's, and these, you'll see - Oh, the interstate push rods. Those are

the pushers. Very good. Wow. - They're so big. Yeah. - I don't, yeah. And so where this green, you see this green tooling up here? That of course is just tooling that gets the, the second stage gets mounted where that is. Okay. - Yep. And then these are looks like some, - These are the, this all part of the RCS system. Oh. And so you have to the, these are heaters to keep the RCS propellant at the right temperature. - Yep. Get that gas up to operating pressure. Wow. And so you have a quad thruster

packet looks at 1, 2, 3, 4. Wow. That's, these are just huge. - The scale of everything is very large. - And so there's gonna be, we, I'll have to take a look at this now that we're on the inside. So we got a tandem pair here. - Yeah. And then just, they're all the same. It's just not, it's just not, there's, some of 'em are just not quite installed. Got it Wow. So this thing's gonna have a ton of control authority with thrusters galore. - That helps. That helps for even for terminal landing. Right.

The RCS system can target help the position. So you're basically getting to push, you know, you've got thrust vector control at the base to control the base of the vehicle. Yep. But you can also control the top of the vehicle. - Helps you be able to do kind of later movement like that. Correct. Correct. It's like, if you think about it, doing a vertical landing is like, is an inverted pendulum problem. So you're balancing a pencil or a broom stick, on the end of your finger. And actually this is one, rockets love to be big

in a bunch of ways. There's a lot of advantages. One big disadvantage to a large rocket is manufacturing is difficult. Right. But, but there are a lot of advantages to a large rocket parasitic mass doesn't matter as much. Rotating machines like to be big 'cause they have parasitic losses too. Right, right. A lot of advantages. Vertical landing likes big rockets because it's easier to balance a broom stick. You can balance on the tip of your finger. Try doing that with a pencil or a toothpick. Right. You can't do it. And the reason is That the

inertia slows everything down. So it's much easier with something that has high inertia to balance it. Yep. But if you can use your RCS system at the top of the vehicle, you, the easiest thing to do, you know, you can't quite do this with a rocket. But if you imagine trying to balance that pencil on the tip of your finger, if you could also hold it from the top. - Right. Right. You're cheating at that point. Yeah. The problem gets a little simpler. Even simpler. So to some degree you can do that. And of course

what you're really trying to do is you do need quite a bit of control authority for that terminal landing because you don't know what wind gusts you're gonna get. Right. You get a lot of disturbances. You need to react to some of those. You need to be able to react quickly to unpredictable disturbances. This is why landing on the moon in some ways is actually easier. You have, it's much harder in other ways. Right. For example, you don't have a prepared landing field. You have craters and boulders and things that, you know, it's an unprepared

landing surface that makes it harder. But the fact that you have no aerodynamic disturbances makes it easier. - Especially with modeling. You can just say- - Yes. Correct. What we, the hard parts, there's still hard parts to model on a lunar, we don't know. It's very hard to model the crater that you dig with your own propulsion system and things like that. Yeah. So I'm not, it's a very difficult Problem, but it's a different problem. - Different problem. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. - Trying to think what else to show you up here. I guess that's it.

You wanna head back down? - Sure. - Yeah. This is, I still have a lot to show you - Don't have to tell me twice. This is awesome. - Look at, this is an umbilical panel. Oh right. And this is the actuator that opens the door, you know, opens and closes the door. So you know, you basically want, this is a T-0 umbilical, so the, you know, when you lift off The door closes. Oh cool. To protect these so that they'll be ready for reuse. - I'm ready for the next - One. Another thing you

wouldn't have to worry about if the vehicle is expendable. - Expendable. Yeah. That is cool. It's like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory in here. It's like one thing, one room after another of magical surprises. I'm excited to show you the composite bay. This is where we build the fairings and the payload adapter and it's such an incredible technology. But first let's look at some large machine tools That can show you've seen the barrel sections. Yep. Now I'm gonna show you where the panels are made. Yep. - Okay. CNCed into those... - Orthogrid. Orthogrid. Correct. Thank you.

Yep. - Oh, thank you. Yeah. - Awesome. Thank you. Hi there. - Hey, how's it going? Doing alright. How are you? Good, thank you. So this is the finished product. The way this works is you mill this orthogrid pattern while the plate is flat. - Okay. - And then that giant machine over there is called a bump forming machine. - Okay. - Yep. And you basically, after you've milled it, you put it in that machine and there's a big hydraulic crest that bumps it. And as you bump it, it curves, it rolls, it rolls like

this. And so you end up with this final shape. Wow. And it's much more efficient than trying to mill it in this shape. Oh, right. You machine this, you need a five axis mill if you were gonna mill it Already round. - Yeah. No, thank you. - It's gonna be very hard. Right. Milling it while it's like this is much, much easier. Yeah. - I can imagine - Milling it while it's flat, I mean - Right, - Right. So in fact that big stack, that's the starting material. Cool. This straight raw, that's just aluminum lithium

plate. Okay. - So it's pretty, it's as thick as the, as the grid is and then youre taking the material out. Correct. Okay. - We actually take a thin layer off the top and the bottom. Okay. Just to relieve some of the strain That ends up digging in the material from their manufacturing process. Okay. Just take a thin layer off the top and bottom. Yep. And then mill all those pockets. - Okay. Okay. - Do you have any idea, like how much does one of those sheets weigh? Like that, that looks- - I don't know,

I don't know that weight. I mean - It's heavy and of course we removed 90% of that material. Yeah, - That's what I was gonna say. By the way, - But for GS2, we're moving to monocoque tank, we're gonna get rid of the orthogrid because we found enough performance in other places that we don't need the performance of the orthogrid. Really. So if we're gonna keep it for GS1 because GS1 is reusable. Right. Right. So, you know, you can, it you can afford the, to it makes more economic sense for reusable article to go for

the extra performance. Yep. Because that cost of, of doing the orthogrid gets be amortized over 25 flights for an expendable article like GS2, the math changes And since we're gonna throw it away after every flight, the second stage. Yep. Yep. We want to have, we, we've looked at it and we've figured out how to save. There's, it's only, it's the, the mass save, the mass penalty for going to monocoque is not huge. Okay. And the cost savings is justified. Okay. - It's a trade benefit. - It's a cost versus performance trade. And we've found performance

on GS2 and other places. For example, the BE3U engine is coming in at 172,000 pounds of thrust instead of 160. Oh wow. So we did- our requirement was 160. The team did an amazing job. Wow. It's really turning in turn out to be incredible. I'm gonna show you in a minute. So I was saying, you know, we can switch to monocoque for GS2 and keep ortho grid for GS1. Yep. And that's a good trade. Yeah. Reusability expandability. Yep. We're also working on a reusable second stage. Right. And we're gonna let that be a horse race.

So the, the goal for the expendable stage is to become So cheap to manufacture that reusability never makes sense. Awesome. And the goal for the reusable stage is to become so operable that exp expandability never makes sense. And so it's, and we will see because when you do that trade on paper, it just isn't obvious. Right. Right. On the first stage it's blindingly obvious. Right, right, right. Yeah. It's like the bulk of the cost. - It's lowest velocities. Yeah. Correct. It's everything lines up for reusability. Yeah. For the second stage, it's an interesting horse race.

Yeah. So we're just gonna go barreling down both paths. And try to figure out which one is better. Really. Yeah. And 'cause it's just about cost. - At the end of the day. Yeah. At the end of the day it's just about cost - Are where you actually at in terms of that second stage, the reusable second stage. We're doing all like thermal. We have a design we have, And we're doing lots of development on thermal protection systems. Okay. Okay. And that's, by the way, for a reusable second stage, there's also an interesting trade between

aluminum and stainless. So because of the higher thermal properties of stainless, it's possible for it to trade better than aluminum. Right. For a reusable second stage. Yep. Yep. 'cause it, it gives you some benefit on reentry. Right. But it doesn't give you, it's not, it's, It's not totally obvious because you still have thermal protection systems and if those work correctly, there's some advantages to the aluminum just because, you know, you can get better thermal structural mass properties with the aluminum. Exactly. - The space shuttle, you know, aluminum airframe there. Yeah. - It's, yeah. You know,

so it's, that's. That one is a very interesting- that one is an interesting trade and you kinda have to work both. It turns into a lot of practical issues. Again, most of these interesting trades, you cannot decide at the conceptual level. - Right. Right. - Because they're happening at a much more fine grained level. Right. There's little details about which one is easier to manufacture, you know, - Which, which is easier to integrate or something. - Little things. Yeah. So you love the trades where the answer is obvious. - You do the trade, it's like,

"oh, duh". - Those are great trades. And then, but a lot of them unfortunately turn into, "huh." You know, it's not clear and the little practical issues are gonna dominate. Right. Does that make sense? And they might not rear their head until you're three years down the road. They - They never do. Yeah. They're like, because they're at that fine level of detail. Right. So - Again, you're talking about the modeling earlier of reentry. It's probably a similar design decision there. Like the models can get you and the paperwork can get you so far, but

until actually start doing it- - It's about the practicalities of things like thermal protection systems and are they actually operable? You know, how much refurbishment do you need to do, et cetera, et cetera. - Yeah. That makes sense. That's cool. We'll keep moving. Cool. Still have a lot to show you. - This is just- - Normally it's funny, I normally tell like when I go and see a rocket factory 90% of the time, I'm like, don't worry about showing me your, your CNC machines, every CNC machine looks the same until you walk into a room

like this. And it's an entire building is one, is one machine. And it's like, oh, - By - The way, it's a little different. You should, - You should see our engine factory is crazy that you have to go there someday. That's in Huntsville. Yeah. We're not gonna see that today obviously. Yep. But in another, another time perhaps. But that is, from a CNC point of view and machines and so on, that's incredible. Oh, I'll bet. When you guys are ramping up BE4 production looks like it's starting to really ramp up here. - It is.

Next year we'll be building a BE4 every three days. Really? Yeah. And we've already got two complete ship sets sitting at Vulcan and a third ship set about to ship there too. Wow. - And the New Glenn engines are all in assembly for this first flight. Thank you. Now we'll head to composites. Cool. I'm very impressed by this technology. This is a technology that would impress the Apollo engineers. Oh, for sure. Have you ever seen a big carbon fiber tape laying machine. - I just saw a decent sized one. I think it was like two,

like probably two meters in diameter or something. And it was pretty, you know, pretty incredible. And I'd never actually been able to see one, I, you know, I've seen like video of like the 787. Yeah. You know, machine and stuff like that. - Yeah. This will be kind of similar in scale to that. - That's crazy. It's mesmerizing. - It really is. Come on in. Hey, how are you? Good, thank you. - How you doing A great job. - Oh, Thank you. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. - Appreciate. I've been in the business 36 years and

- Really appreciate that. - I'll tell you now, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, I worked for all three for more than 10 years. It's the best company I ever worked for. - I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to tell me that. - This is still will be my last job. - All right. I don't have to work anymore anywhere else. Thank you. That's so nice. That's always good to hear. - What a sweet thing to say. - That's awesome. And that and now I'll slip in the 20 on the way

out. I know. - I like, I didn't even tip him. I mean that's, - I love that. That's a good sign. So we build the fairings here, the big carbon composite fairings. Yep. And we build the payload adapters here. Yeah. This is the Escapade payload adapter. Oh, that's awesome. This is the actual flight article. So you know this, it basically distributes the loads. So the payload sits on the top of that adapter And then it distributes the loads down to the periphery of the GS2 tank. - Yep. Yep. Because the load has to get transferred

through the walls. It has to get transferred through the walls of the tank. So you have to spread that load out to get it to the periphery. And, you know, Escapade is, the vehicles is oversized for Escapade, but it's a very good first launch. Yeah. And you know we have to hit that Mars window. Yes. - Coming, coming right up. Yeah, - That is coming right up. - I want to go and show you the big machine. This is the big oven. So after you manufacture the article, you have to cure it at temperature. And

that's the big oven where we cure things over here. We do non-destructive testing of the article after it's finished. Okay. We use ultrasound to look for imperfections. - This is gonna be good to have this woman walking through here because gives scale. - I know it's hard. Like my brain did one of those things where it's like, "oh yeah". And there's like, "OH YEAH," - It's a big oven. - That's a huge oven. - Come on in. - Thank you. - You got it. Come on in guys. - I'm gonna take you all the way

to the top because that's the best viewing area. - We're building a fairing half right now. And so that is the head that lays the tape. If you go down, you'll see the, The tape dispensers down there, which we can see on the way out. You can peek at it. But basically the head travels in a machine controlled, you know, program programmatically lays tape. Yeah. Little narrow carbon fiber tape. And it just builds up the entire... - There it's starting to move. I don't know if we'll get to see it do its thing or not,

- Just layer by layer. - Just layer by layer in a highly engineered pattern. And you know, carbon fiber has Strength in only one direction. Yeah. So what you do is you understand all of your loads and then you design it. So you're, some of the carbon fiber you'll lay in a diagonal, you'll lay some of it perpendicular. Yep. And so, but you can lay the right amount 'cause your loads aren't equal. So you can make a material that's not homogeneous. Right. It can be designed so that it takes the loads. Change places with me,

you'll get a better view. - Oh, that's cool. So does it do a little bit of like curing as it's laying or- - That's for the glue. Oh, cool. So the tape has, the tape comes, has, has glue on it. So that's why it sticks. - Got it. - Wow. Isn't that incredible? - That's satisfying. That's really satisfying. And does this do like a, is there a honeycomb structure, like an aluminum core inside the fairing or is it pure carbon fiber? - There is a structure inside it too. Isn't that incredible? - That's insane. That's

really cool. I love that stuff. I can watch- You shouldn't shown me that 'cause honestly, I'd probably just sit here and watch this all day. Like just meditation almost. - You know, it's, it's incredible. Oh that's cool. And you can, we make on the same machine... It's very versatile. So we make the payload adapters here on the same machine, it's just a different tool. Cool. It's a different tool and a different program. Wow. But it's just as versatile as like a CNC milling machine would be. - Yeah. Yeah. It's like a CNC machine for carbon

fiber. - Correct. - And it's additive. - Yeah. Yeah. And it's very predictable. So what, you know, we're doing non-destructive testing on this and we have repair methodologies, but we don't have to use them very often 'cause it's a very, very repeatable process. Yeah. That's what you're always looking For when you get to production. Oh right. You need the process to be repeatable. Yeah. Which by the way is what you need when you're delivering 10 billion packages a year too. Yeah. You need a repeatable process. - Yeah, you do. - So yeah. I promise you

the Apollo guys would be impressed by this. Oh yeah. Oh, they would love this. - Alright. Engine prep? Yeah. Let's go to engines. Cool. I know you like engines. I love engines. And I know you know something about them. This will be a treat for you, I promise. - Oh, I don't know. I don't know what it is about the engines. - Don't you love this giant thing moving. I mean, again, it's hard to get the scale of this. - Right? I mean - It is massive. Yeah. - You can see the, the pod. That's

all of the, the various Carbon tape inside that. And then you can set up another one over there and it can exchange pods. That's crazy. So you keep the machine running. Wow. - And so you can see all the tape. That's cool. See all the tape coming down. Wow. That's so satisfying. That's incredible. - These are giant objects. Yes. - What I think a lot of people don't always, you know, so far the public has really mostly seen New Shepherd and they think of a certain scale and certain size And they're just gonna be blindsided.

I don't think the average person understands how big New Glenn is and how just total like, you know, orders of magnitude bigger. - I'm sure you're right. - It's crazy. What I love about New Shepherd is how you're able to prove out so many technologies - Absolutely. - That you're actually, I think the most clever thing is that you're able to, to turn it into a product, Basically using a test bed as a valuable product too. Exactly. And by the way, that is how business works, right? You like, your customers use your services and that

gives you repetition to improve your services. By the way, I don't know if you if you notice this, but we have four GS1s for booster stages in process right here. Like you can see, I showed you the one, but here's another one. There's another one over there. There are four in process right now. - How big is the fleet hoping to be as far as- - Well, we're gonna produce multiple GS1 every year. Really? So we're just gonna keep producing GS1. We're gonna rate manufacturing. You have to have a rate. Yeah. You could just say

we're gonna produce a certain number and then stop. Right? You want to make 'em all the time. Okay. Oh yeah. Going in to see real flight hardware again. Oh yeah. - This is the good stuff. - These are the, the flight BE3Us. So these are the LH2, LOx engines that will power the second stage. This is for the first mission. So these are the Escapade engines. Wow. - They're bigger than you think. The, you think the be - Three. And, but, and keep in mind these, the, the vacuum nozzle isn't here yet. That's huge. Because

we're gonna, we install these, then we do a hot fire Yep. At sea level. Yep. And you can't have the, the nozzle skirt on for the sea level firing. Yep. Then we'll put the, for the actual mission, we'll put the Vacuum skirts on. The vacuum skirts are gigantic. They dominate the whole engines. Vacuum engines are always the prettiest. Yeah. Yeah. Because they, they have those big skirts. - Yeah. But it looks like they're, I didn't realize- do you mind if we come in for a minute? Absolutely. Look around a little bit. We're gonna get outta

your way. No, you don't have to keep, keep doing whatever you're doing to let us bother you. Thank you. - Thank you. It's cool that everyone signed their names on it. Yeah. We signed all that. They had me sign my name. I signed over there too. That's awesome. - That's so cool. So this is BE3U without its skirt. It's a very interesting pump configuration. So it is back to back turbines. So, the way this, this is an open expander. So a portion of the fuel flows through the thrust chamber. to regeneratively cool. the thrust chamber.

Yep. And it picks up a lot of heat as it does that. Yep. So it has a lot of enthlopy and then that gets routed to the turbines. Yep. So that hot hydrogen flows through the hydrogen pump turbine first. Okay. Yep. Because it requires the most energy. It requires the most horsepower, the most energy. And then, as for after it exits the hydrogen turbine, it enters the oxide turbine. Wow. Still enough energy. So basically you can see it, you know, this is the high energy, hot hydrogen gas coming in. Yep. And it passes through. This

is the hydrogen pump up here. Yep. And so it passes through the hydrogen turbine flowing in this direction down. And then right here is the Ox turbine. This is the Ox pump. And then it flows through the, the Ox turbine. And, and what's very clever, it's a very clever little detail. The two turbines rotate in opposite directions. Really? Because efficiency really matters on these pumps. Yeah. And even just a few points of efficiency is a big difference. And one of the waste products of flowing through a turbine is that your exhaust, your turbine exhaust always

has a little rotational component. Yeah. That rotational component is wasted. Right. So there's energy in that rotation, Which you wish you could capture. Right. But you can't except if you have a, if you have a second turbine and you rotate it in the opposite way, it gets to capture the waste energy of the first turbine. This can actually get you a few points of efficiency. Wow. And then what happens is after it comes through this turbine, this is, I'm gonna show you another I told you, remember I told you it had so many tricks in

the sixties. They figured out so many interesting things. Yep. Here's one more trick. So this is the turbine exhaust comes out here and there's another duct that doesn't get installed in the sequence until the end. Yep. But this duct comes over here and it dumps the turbine exhaust Yep. Into this big manifold. Yep. And that turbine exhaust cools the nozzle skirt. So the question is, what are you gonna do with your turbine exhaust? Right. And is there anything in an open cycle. In an open cycle like this? Yeah. And so is there anything useful you

can do With your turbine exhaust? And the answer is yes. Yes. You can use it to cool your skirt extension. For your film cooling. You're basically film cooling for the skirt. And so that's what this big manifold is. Wow. Isn't that interesting? And so that's hydrogen coming out of there. Because you don't wanna film cool with oxygen. It's, it's hydrogen. So this will, so I'll, we can see it over here. This, okay, so this is, This is the high pressure hydrogen. Okay. Yep. Coming out of the hydrogen pump. Okay. So this is the pump, the

high pressure exit from the pump is here. Okay. It splits. Yep. Into two paths. - This is the big path. Most, most of the hydrogen goes this way. Yep. And it goes in straight into the injector. Yep. - Through the main fuel valve there. - Correct. Yep. This is a little bit of the hydrogen high pressure hydrogen goes in here and it goes into the regen Channels. - So this is cooling the chamber. - Yep. - And then that's the piece that comes out and comes out over there. And comes around and feeds the turbine.

- And it's hot at that point. It's hot hydrogen gas. - It's 445 seconds of ISP. Wow. - And that's considering that it's all things said and done, you know, it's, it's not even closed cycle and it's still getting 445. - It's not closed cycle. - Which is crazy. - But, but hydrogen also, because it's such a light molecule if you're exhaust gas is hydrogen, hot hydrogen all by itself actually gets a very high ISP. - Right. Because it's so light. So open cycles on hydrogen turn out also not to trade too badly. - Right,

right. What you're throwing over the end, over the edge is literally just H2 molecules. - Yeah. Yeah. Super, super lightweight. - And here we're even using it as a coolant. So you That's cool. So, - So it's, so it's technically it's, it is probably dual shafts mix ofs, mix of counter rotating. It's - Absolutely two shafts. But they're in line. - They're just arranged in line. Cool. And they're back to back. Yep. But the two turbines face each other. - Okay. That's really cool. Isn't that cool? - That's clever. I've never seen anything like that.

- I don't know if an engine like this has ever flown before. You might know better than me. - I don't know of, I've never seen a inline dual turbines that feed each other too. That's, that's the cool thing is that you get energy just off of the, after it's come through, the hydrogen pump is still enough to power the oxygen pump. That's crazy. - This is a development article. Okay. And now we use it for, you know, basically fitment tests and stuff. And things like that. So this one has tons of development instrumentation on

it. You can see all the extra wire looming and stuff. It's all, we call DFI do, you know, DFI that acronym, I don't know, Development, Flight Instrumentation. Oh. So it's just like, it's like extra instrumentation used during the development phase. Yeah. But yeah, single shaft Ox rich stage combustion. This is basically very much like the RD-180. Yep. Except it's methane instead of kerosene. Yep. Yep. Very high performing cycle. And what we have is a life designed is I like a medium performing variant when you want reusability in life. Yeah. I like a medium performing variant

of a high performing cycle - Because you have some margin in there? Because you take stress off of everything. So for example, we operate just above 2000 PSI chamber pressure because we are at relatively, the Ox rich stage combustion cycle operates at relatively modest temperatures. Right. So the turbine gas doesn't have to be very hot. Right. So that you're taking all of your oxygen, your, all of your oxygen is flowing through the turbine. Yep. So if you are flowing a small amount of your, like in a gas generator cycle, you're flowing a small amount of

propellant through the turbine. And so you do need you to get efficiency, you need that gas to be pretty hot and that high temperature because of thermal cycling is gonna put a lot of stress on your turbine. Andso in a Ox rich cycle, Ox oxygen rich stage combustion cycle, going through your turbine is all of the oxygen. And so since you have so much mass flow, you don't have to make it that hot. Yep. So it's more like warm Gox going through the turbine - And you're just adding just a splash of- - It's a

tiny bit of fuel. And that's the preburner. The preburner takes a tiny bit of fuel and all of the oxygen. Yep. And you, you kind of make the, you make warm GOx. Yep. And then that huge mass flow of warm GOx gives you enough horsepower on your turbine. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And so again, you get the thermal cycling on your turbine is more modest. Yes. Yep. And if you go to very high chamber pressures, you start to lose some of that advantage. Yeah. So, and for a booster stage, if you're, if since

we can afford to do that, because this isn't our upper stage engine. Right. So this is our upper stage engine. Yeah. So this needs to be, this is liquid hydrogen, So it's gonna be, this is another thing that the Apollo guys did is they said, "Hmm, we should use a hydrocarbon for the booster and LH2 for the upper stages". Yep. It's because the high ISP really pays for itself on the upper stages. You know, the F1 is an example was not a high performing engine. No. Right. Less than a thousand PSI of chamber pressure. Right,

right. - And pretty low specific impulse. Low specific impulse. You know, this engine has 340 seconds of specific impulse. - Walk all over the F1 in that regard. And so on a booster engine, if you're a reusable booster, what you really need is reusability. Yeah. Yeah. And so we need high ISP on the second stage. and we need high life on the first stage. Yep. - That's cool. - So that's what that engine is optimized for. The team has done an amazing job on it. - Holy crap. That was crazy. Okay. I know I probably

expressed this a few times, but, you know, seeing pictures and video of this stuff is one thing, But then like, standing around and inside of these things, it's just, it's insane. New Glenn's just a lot bigger and more crazy than I even pictured. It is just different to see it up close and personal and my mind's frazzled. That was incredible. And yeah, thank you so much to the Blue Origin team for helping put all this together. Of course. And all this, I mean, giving me access like this, it's crazy. And especially thank you to Jeff

Bezos for all of his time. That was very, very generous. So thank you so much. I had an amazing, amazing time. And make sure you subscribe so you know, when part two comes out, you're not gonna want to miss this. And I, a huge thank you to all my supporters. So those of you at Patreon and YouTube members and ex subscribers, wherever you're, however you're helping, even if you're just giving a thumbs up or some thanks or whatever, it all makes a huge difference and makes videos like this possible. So head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut,

And while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome new merch such as this F1 shirt that's part of our 1969 collection. We've got a ton of really, really cool stuff that pays homage to the 1969 Apollo era. And, you know, I believe we're kind of in a new Apollo era ourselves these days. So really exciting stuff. We've got tons of cool stuff. So check it all out everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut gimme space down to earth for everyday people.