Blue Origin Just Revealed Super Heavy New Glenn to Beat SpaceX Starship

Blue Origin Just Revealed 'SUPER HEAVY' New Glenn With 13 BE-4 Engines to Beat SpaceX Starship
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Today Blue Origin just dropped a massive update on New Glenn that completely changes how we view the rocket just days after the perfect NG 2 mission and booster landing. They revealed a whole series of upgrades rolling out as soon as the third flight, and honestly, the numbers are wild. Here I'll go more in depth into what exactly is changing, the new thrust levels, subcooling details, payload boosts, the surprise super-heavy 9 by 4 variant, reusable fairings, and why this positions New Glenn as a serious beast in the heavy-lift world. It all starts with the engines. The first stage uses seven BE 4’s running on methane and lox. Originally each BE 4 was specked at 550,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, giving the booster roughly 3.85 to 3.9 million pounds total liftoff thrust. Through testing they've already pushed single engines to 625,000 pounds under normal propellant temperatures, and Blue Origin says they'll hit 640,000 pounds by the end of 2025. The real leap comes from introducing subcooled propellants — chilling the lox and LNG way below normal boiling points to pack more mass into the same tank volume. That densified propellant flows faster through the turbopumps and nozzles, so with the exact same hardware the total booster thrust jumps to 4.5 million pounds, or 19,928 kilo newton. That's a solid 15 to 17% increase without making the rocket physically bigger. If you look at the new Blue Origin render posted today — the one with New Glenn roaring off LC 36 under a huge full moon with those bright blue methane-rich plumes — you can almost feel that extra power in the image. The second stage gets an equally big upgrade. It normally flies with two vacuum-optimized BE 3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and lox. The original design was around 160,000 pounds per engine for a combined 320,000 pounds of vacuum thrust. Testing has already shown a single BE 3U producing over 211,000 pounds, and now with subcooling applied to the hydro lox propellants, which are especially effective on hydrogen because of its super-low density — the pair will progressively step up to a total of 400,000 pounds of thrust across the next few missions. That's a 25% thrust increase on the upper stage alone, which translates directly into way more energy for high orbits, direct GTO injections, or lunar and deep-space trajectories. These propulsion gains don't happen in a vacuum — they're paired with a bunch of vehicle-wide improvements that make the company roll in at the same time. They're introducing a new lower-cost tank design that still handles the colder, denser propellants without issues. The thermal protection system on the reusable first stage is getting upgraded to a higher performance, more durable material that can better survive reentry heating and allow much faster refurbishment between flights. Avionics are being refined for better redundancy and processing speed, and recovery operations for both the booster and, soon, the payload fairings are being streamlined. Speaking of fairings, Blue Origin is finally adding reusable payload fairings to the mix. The current 7-meter composite fairing will be catchable or recoverable at sea so they can fly again, which drops recurring cost and helps support the high launch cadence needed for things like Project Kuiper or national security constellations. All of these changes start phasing in with NG 3, meaning every customer already on the manifest — NASA, DoD, commercial sat operators — basically gets free extra performance on their existing contracts. But the part that really made everyone do a double-take today was the roadmap slide showing the future super-heavy variant they're calling New Glenn 9 by 4. As the name suggests, it's nine BE 4s on the first stage and four BE 3Us on a stretched second stage, using the exact same upgraded, subcooled engine tech. In reusable mode with booster recovery this version is rated for over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, more than 14 metric tons direct to geosynchronous orbit, and over 20 metric tons on trans-lunar injection trajectories. To handle bigger payloads, it gets an 8.7-meter diameter fairing — wider than the current one and competitive with the biggest envelopes out there.

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