Author: Joey Roulette
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin prepared for the inaugural launch of its New Glenn rocket from Florida early on Monday, moving closer to a key debut in Earth orbit that will mark a major step toward its long-awaited goal of competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite launch market.
The 30-story, partially reusable New Glenn launcher sat on the Blue Origin launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, ready for liftoff at 1:30 a.m. ET (0630 GMT) after being fueled with methane and liquid oxygen.
The mission, the culmination of a decades-long, multibillion-dollar development journey, will involve attempting to land New Glenn’s first thruster stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after liftoff, while the rocket’s second stage continues toward orbit.
“The thing we’re most nervous about is the booster landing,” Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, told Reuters in an interview before the launch. “Clearly you can have an anomaly at any stage of the mission on the first flight, so anything can happen.”
Secured inside the cargo bay at New Glenn is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.
Getting a spacecraft to its intended orbit on its first rocket launch would be a rare feat for a space company.
If we could do that, it would be a huge success, Bezos said. “Landing the booster would be the icing on the cake.”
New Glenn’s development spanned three Blue Origin executives and faced numerous delays as Elon Musk’s SpaceX grew into an industrial powerhouse with its reusable Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket.
Bezos set out to speed things up at Blue Origin in late 2023, prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Dave Limp, an Amazon (NASDAQ: ) veteran, as CEO, who employees say has brought a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.
New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and has dozens of launch contracts with customers worth a combined billion dollars.
