Earlier this year, Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos promised to unveil details about his company's orbital rocket "later this summer," and on Monday morning he delivered. In an e-mail, Bezos released some preliminary details about the "New Glenn" rocket which will employ seven of the company's next generation BE-4 rocket engines, making for a powerful rocket indeed. The rocket is named for the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn.

According to Bezos, the two-stage variant of New Glenn will measure 23-feet in diameter and stand 270 feet tall, with a sea-level thrust of 3.85 million pounds. The engines will burn liquefied natural gas and liquefied oxygen. The three-stage variant of New Glenn will be 313 feet tall, with a single BE-3 engine powering its upper stage. "New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space," Bezos wrote. "The three-stage variant—with its high specific impulse hydrogen upper stage—is capable of flying demanding beyond-LEO missions."

Blue Origin, which is in the midst of building launch and production facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida, plans to fly New Glenn for the first time by the end of this decade, Bezos said. The new rocket and its engines, like the smaller BE-3 and New Shepard Propulsion module upon which it is based, will be reusable. The first stage of the booster is being designed to fly a minimum of 25 missions. This does not seem an idle boast, either, as Blue Origin has already flown and landed a single New Shepard rocket four times.

It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of such a rocket or the Blue Origin announcement. Although the lift capabilities of New Glenn were not immediately available, the thrust the rocket will produce is considerable. Each BE-4 engine produces a thrust of 550,000 pounds, for a total of 3.85 million pounds at launch. The most powerful rocket currently in operation, the Delta IV Heavy, has a launch thrust of about 2.1 million pounds. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, which may fly in 2017, will have a thrust of about 5.1 million pounds at sea level.

By way of further comparison, the space shuttle's main engines had an individual thrust of 470,000 pounds. Along with its solid-rocket boosters, the shuttle had 7 million pounds of thrust at launch. The Saturn V rocket, with five F1 engines, had about 7.5 million pounds of thrust. So Blue Origin's very first orbital rocket will have slightly more than half the thrust of the rockets that carried humans to the Moon.

And this may just be the beginning. When Ars visited with Bezos earlier this year, the Amazon.com founder said, "Our first orbital vehicle will not be our last, and it will be the smallest orbital vehicle we will ever build." Indeed, in his e-mail sent Monday, Bezos teased just this, writing "New Glenn is a very important step. It won’t be the last of course. Up next on our drawing board: New Armstrong. But that’s a story for the future."