To reuse or not reuse—the eternal debate of New Glenn's second stage reignites

Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it.

The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?

Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible. This strategy worked, as SpaceX has lowered its internal launch costs of a Falcon 9, even with a new second stage, to about $15 million. The company is now focused on making the larger Starship rocket fully reusable.

New Glenn is quite a bit larger than the Falcon 9 vehicle, 98 meters in height compared to 70 meters, and with a 7-meter diameter compared to the Falcon 9’s 3.7 meters; but it is also smaller than Starship. Accordingly Blue Origin has struggled with whether to reuse the New Glenn upper stage or to seek to ruthlessly cut its manufacturing costs.

Ebbs and flows of the debate

Over the years, this internal debate has waxed and waned.

A little more than five years ago, Blue Origin kicked off a project to develop a reusable stainless-steel upper stage known as “Project Jarvis.” This initiative was later abandoned. In the run-up to the first launch of New Glenn in early 2025, both the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and CEO, Dave Limp, told Ars in an interview that they were continuing to trade the options on New Glenn’s upper stage, known as GS2.

However, a new job posting suggests the debate may be swinging back toward reusing GS2. The job, for a director of “Reusable Upper Stage Development,” was posted Thursday by the company.

“As the Director of Program Management for the New Glenn Upper Stage and Payload Accommodations (GS2PA), you will work with the Vice President of New Glenn GS2PA and directly support the execution of a lean engineering initiative to incrementally develop a reusable upper stage,” the job description states. The salary range goes up to $284,430.30.

New Glenn is an exceptional rocket, flying expertly on its debut in January 2025, and then shocking the aerospace world (in a good way) by making a stunning first stage landing at sea on just its second flight in November 2025.

But this performance comes at a cost.

Second stage is costly right now

The first generation of the rocket is overengineered and very expensive. Although Ars does not have access to Blue Origin’s internal costs, sources have reliably indicated that it costs in excess of $100 million to manufacture a first stage and more than $50 million to build an upper stage.

The first stage cost can be amortized over multiple launches, and that’s precisely what Blue Origin plans to do with the vehicle’s third launch, which will reuse the first stage that landed in November. However, flying super-expensive upper stages is no way to build a sustainable launch business.

Right now, Blue Origin has the capacity to build a dozen second stages a year, and it is bringing a new facility online to manufacture more. Presumably, it will be able to shave some costs with rate manufacturing and a simpler second stage design. But this will have limits. The problem gets even worse with the planned upgrade to New Glenn, the 9×4 version of the rocket that will use four BE-3U engines. Such an upper stage probably will cost on the order of $100 million to manufacture.

Hence the pressure on Blue Origin to find a pathway to reuse. The challenge is that reusing the upper stages of rockets is still something of an unknown. SpaceX is still experimenting with thermal protection for its Starship vehicle’s return from orbital velocities, and there will be a performance hit for propellant and landing gear mass. So the new director of upper stage development has their work cut out for them.