Historic Blue Origin New Glenn Rocket Launch
Twenty-five years after its founding, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is finally ready to make its first orbital flight on a brand-new rocket that the company hopes will shake up the commercial space race.
Blue Origin said on X that its launch, originally scheduled for Sunday, was delayed a day because of “unfavorable” sea conditions.
The rocket, named “New Glenn” after the legendary astronaut, is 98 meters tall, about the size of a 32-story building, and is scheduled to blast off from the Space Force spaceport at Cape Canaveral at 1 a.m. on Monday (Jan. 13).
“Pointy end up!” Chief Executive Dave Limp posted a photo of the gleaming white behemoth on X.
With the mission, called NG-1, Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, is aiming directly at Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Musk’s company, SpaceX, dominates the orbital launch market with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
They provide services to the commercial sector, the Pentagon, and NASA, including ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
“SpaceX has been pretty much the only player in the industry for the last few years, so it’s great to have a competitor,” retired senior NASA official G. Scott Hubbard told AFP.
Meanwhile, SpaceX plans to conduct the next orbital test of its massive new-generation rocket, Starship, on the same day, adding to the sense of intense competition.
If all goes according to plan, Blue Origin will attempt to land its first-stage booster on a drone ship named Jacklyn, in honor of Bezos’ mother, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean about 1,000 kilometers from the launch site shortly after launch. While
SpaceX has made such landings a near-routine spectacle; this will be the first time Blue Origin has attempted a landing on the high seas.
Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, carrying a prototype spacecraft called Blue Ring, funded by the Department of Defense, which will ride on the rocket for a test flight of about six hours.
Limp stressed that getting into orbit is the primary goal, and successfully recovering the booster would be a welcome “bonus.”
Blue Origin does have experience recovering New Shepard rockets for suborbital tourism, but they are much smaller and land on land, not on a sea ship.
Blue Origin has been awarded a contract by NASA to launch two Mars rovers using the New Glenn rocket. The rocket will also support the deployment of the Kuiper Project, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with the Starlink Project.
Bezos shares Musk’s lifelong love of space. But while Musk’s dream is to colonize Mars, Bezos envisions moving heavy industry to an extraterrestrial floating space platform to protect Earth, the “blue origin of mankind.”
He founded Blue Origin in 2000, two years before Musk founded SpaceX, but unlike his competitors’ philosophy of “fail fast, learn fast,” he took a more cautious pace.
“There is an impatience in the space community with Blue Origin’s very cautious approach,” Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University and a former member of the National Space Council, told AFP.
If New Glenn succeeds, it will provide the U.S. government with “heterogeneous redundancy”—a” valuable backup in case one system fails, Pace said.
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