Blue Origin‘s newly constructed landing barge arrived at Port Canaveral earlier today. Named after Jeff Bezos’ mother, Jacklyn, it will support at-sea landings and recoveries of the company’s New Glenn rocket.
More and more hardware seems to be hitting the public eye for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket program. As the company gears up for New Glenn operations, more hardware is either arriving or being taken to the launch pad.
Arriving early Wednesday morning and being towed by Blue Origin’s recovery support vessel, Harvey Stone, Jacklyn serves the same purpose as SpaceX’s droneships. While it is similar in width, Blue Origin’s barge is much longer and sports much larger support buildings on the forward and aft sections.
Custom-built in Romania and France for Blue Origin, it spent the last month traversing the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern US coast before arriving at her new home in Florida.
It is assumed to have similar features as SpaceX‘s droneship; however, we aren’t able to see the large station-keeping thrusters like SpaceX’s variants have on the side. Unlike SpaceX’s process of purchasing the barges secondhand, with Jacklyn being a custom build, it could feature a more custom solution.
Jacklyn arrives at her new home this morning! pic.twitter.com/r7VeFN8u96
— Jerry Pike (@JerryPikePhoto) September 4, 2024
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is set to launch its first mission, NASA’s ESCAPADE, as soon as October 13 from its launch site on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Port Canaveral space use on the rise
Port Canaveral has become a bustling hub for sea-based space operation ships. Currently, two ships carrying Artemis hardware are located there, NASA’s Pegasus barge and ArianeGroup’s Canopée. These two ships ferried the SLS Core Stage for Artemis 2 and the Orion spacecraft for Artemis 3 respectively.
Alongside SpaceX’s extensive East Coast fleet, Space Perspective, a high-altitude balloon tourism company, is based out of Port Canaveral, and ULA’s Rocketship docks there to deliver Atlas V and Vulcan hardware.
Space Florida released a study proposing a large upgrade to the port, costing nearly $2 billion, to better support space operations. However, no funding has been provided for the upgrades, which would see a large dock built along the Space Force station’s border.
For decades, Port Canaveral has been primarily a cargo and cruise ship hub for Central Florida, but has now been overtaken by the boom in commercial spaceflight. With the cruise industry also not slowing down, it seems to be a good time to be a port authority, at least in Cape Canaveral.
