WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin said on Thursday it will build a bigger, more powerful variant of its New Glenn rocket, drawing early plans for a family of orbital satellite launchers akin to the fleet of Falcon rockets from Elon Musk's dominant SpaceX.
The new rocket, announced after New Glenn's second mission launched last week, will be called New Glenn 9x4, a name referencing nine engines that will power its first stage and four engines on its second stage. That is an increase of two engines for each stage from New Glenn's current design.
"The next chapter in New Glenn's roadmap is a new super-heavy class rocket," Blue Origin said in a statement outlining other rocket upgrades.
Blue Origin did not say when it expects to fly the larger rocket variant. "We aren't disclosing a specific timeframe today. The iterative design from our current 7x2 vehicle means we can build this rocket quickly," a spokesman said in response to timeline questions.
The two New Glenn variants, the company said, "will serve the market concurrently, giving customers more launch options for their missions, including mega-constellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome."
U.S. launch companies such as Rocket Lab, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, which Boeing and Lockheed Martin own, are either building or have early plans for larger rockets that can put bigger batches of satellite constellations into space.
Blue Origin spent billions of dollars and roughly a decade developing New Glenn, a 29-story rocket with a reusable first stage meant to compete with SpaceX's Falcon fleet and more powerful Starship, a fully reusable rocket that remains in development.
Dave Limp, Blue Origin's CEO, posted on X digital renderings of the super-heavy New Glenn standing taller than Saturn V, the 17-story rocket that sent humans to the moon under the U.S. Apollo program. The 9x4 rocket has a larger payload fairing and appears far taller than the original New Glenn design.
(Reporting by Joey RouletteEditing by Rod Nickel and Deepa Babington)
