ORLANDO, Fla. — Blue Origin is highlighting the capabilities of an orbital transfer vehicle design it announced last year, including the ability of the spacecraft to serve as a fuel depot.
The company publicly announced last October its Blue Ring vehicle, which it described as providing a wide array of “in-space logistics and delivery” services from Earth orbit to cislunar space and beyond. The company had been hinting about development of a space tug for at least a year before the announcement.
That announcement provided few details about the technical capabilities of Blue Ring, but a company executive said there has been strong interest in the vehicle. “We’re bringing Blue Ring to market to do a lot of the missions that are starting to emerge from national security, civil and eventually commercial,” said Lars Hoffman, vice president of national security sales at Blue Origin, in a presentation at the SpaceCom conference here Feb. 1.
Blue Ring, he said, has 12 docking ports, each able to accommodate payloads weighing up to 500 kilograms. A top deck on the spacecraft can carry payloads weighing up to two and a half tons. The spacecraft offers 3,000 meters per second of delta V, or change in velocity, to maneuver to different orbits.
The “core mission” of Blue Ring is to deploy satellites in their desired orbits, but the spacecraft can also be used as a bus for hosted payloads. “We can serve as a very capable bus,” Hoffman said, with a design life of three to five years initially.
The ports on Blue Ring could be used to incorporate additional capabilities. One example he gave is robotic arms to support in-space servicing. “We absolutely see that as an extended capability.”
He added that Blue Ring is both refuelable and able to refuel other spacecraft, although he did not disclose the propellants the vehicle uses. “It can act as a refueling depot, if you will, where spacecraft can come up and plug in and fuel, or…
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