Blue Origin has teased what it’s calling a “multi-mission, multi-orbit space mobility platform,” which will serve as a delivery platform connecting the Earth with medium Earth orbit and beyond.
In a brief announcement online, Blue Origin described the process as one that facilitates in-space logistics and delivery, and it looks to combine aspects of the web we know already on Earth with a whole lot more.
Key to the delivery service is a new space vehicle, called Blue Ring, which will serve as a taxi for data and other payloads between Earth and space.
Blue Ring lays foundation for Earth-space connectivity
The company says that Blue Ring will “support a variety of missions in medium Earth orbit out to the cislunar region and beyond.” The cislunar region refers to an area of space between Earth and the moon.
The plan is for it to become available as a logistics tool for commercial and government customers. The platform will provide end-to-end services, including hosting and data relay, but also more conventionally ‘physical’ aspects like transportation, logistics, and refueling. Blue Origin says that it can host payloads of more than 3,000kg.
Paul Ebertz, SVP for In-Space Systems at Blue Origin, said that Blue Ring is designed to help grow space infrastructure and increase mobility on-orbit, otherwise solving “two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today.”
Ebertz added: “We're offering our customers the ability to easily access and maneuver through a variety of orbits cost-effectively while having access to critical data to ensure a successful mission.”
Full details of the new platform remain undisclosed, and we’re filled with questions about what this could mean about the future of space missions.
For now, we can only speculate that Blue Origin may lean on some of the technologies and findings of Amazon, which has already perfected ground logistics and cloud services. Both companies were previously headed up by Jeff Bezos, but have gone their separate ways in terms of leadership.
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