Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin sends rocket recovery ship to scrapyard
A large landing ship that was set to catch rockets for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight company has reportedly been removed from its berth in the Port of Pensacola, Florida, bound for a scrapyard in Brownsville, Texas.
The vessel, which is named Jacklyn after Bezos’ mother, was a former cargo vessel that was undergoing conversion into a landing platform for the company’s New Glenn rocket boosters.
However, in a video released by the port on social media, port director Clark Merritt states that the ship will now be scrapped in Brownsville because the process of converting the ship into a landing platform had gone too far to convert it back to a cargo vessel. There have been no details released to media about why the conversion has been stopped.
“Blue Origin is committed to safe and cost-effective access to space, and after careful consideration have made the decision to transition away from the Jacklyn as a landing solution,” a company spokesperson told media this week.
Blue Origin originally acquired the roll-on, roll-off cargo ship Stena Freighter in 2018. The company brought the ship to Florida for conversion in late 2020, and held a renaming ceremony for the vessel in December 2020.
At over 180 metres long and 25 metres across, Jacklyn would have been a large and stable platform for collecting the rocket’s first stages as they descended back towards Earth.
In April, local media reported that the company had started to ‘revaluate’ the ship’s utility as a landing platform for booster rockets, although did not confirm a decision.
Unconfirmed rumours claim Blue Origin is now leaning in favour of using barges similar to those used by SpaceX for landing rockets at sea.
It is not known exactly how much money had been invested in the conversion to date, although Merritt states in the video that “tens of millions of dollars of work” was carried out.
The first New Glenn is expected to launch in 2023.
