Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission to space, an inaugural step into Earth’s orbit for Jeff Bezos’s space company as it aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.
Thirty storeys tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines thundering under cloudy skies on its second liftoff attempt this week.
Hundreds of employees at the company’s Kent, Wash., headquarters and its Cape Canaveral, Fla., rocket factory roared in applause as Blue Origin vice-president Ariane Cornell announced the rocket’s second stage made it to orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.
“We hit our key, critical, No. 1 objective, we got to orbit safely,” Cornell said on a company livestream. “And y’all, we did it on our first go.”
The rocket’s reusable first stage booster was due to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage, but failed to make that landing, Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster blacked out minutes after liftoff.
“We did, in fact, lose the booster,” Cornell said.
The culmination of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first trek to Earth’s orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company.
Bezos told Reuters on Sunday, before Blue Origin’s first launch attempt, that he was most nervous about landing the booster.
But he added that sticking the landing would be the “icing on the cake” if they could achieve the milestone of getting the payload to its intended orbit.
Secured inside New Glenn’s payload bay for the mission is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a manoeuvrable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.
Rocket’s first launch attempt scrubbed
The rocket’s first attempt to launch on Monday was scrubbed early that morning because ice had accumulated on a propellant line. On Thursday, the company cited no issues ahead of launch.
Bezos monitored the launch from a few kilometres away in Blue Origin’s mission control room, wearing a large headset and flanked by dozens of launch staff. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, was next to him.
New Glenn is expected to press ahead with a backlog of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network that will rival SpaceX’s Starlink service.
New Glenn is the latest U.S. rocket to debut in recent years as governments and private companies beef up their space programs and race to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its workhorse Falcon 9.
NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket had a successful debut in 2022, as did the Vulcan rocket last year from United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s joint launch venture.
New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful as Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, with a payload bay diameter two times larger to fit bigger batches of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the rocket’s launch pricing. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million US.
The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Musk wrote to Bezos on X early Thursday.
SpaceX’s giant, next-generation Starship rocket in development, which New Glenn will also compete with, is expected to further rattle the industry with cheap rides to space and full reusability.
Bezos in late 2023 moved to speed things up at Blue Origin, prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, who employees say introduced a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.
