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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has reached orbit on its maiden flight, boosting the ambitions of Jeff Bezos to challenge the hold of Elon Musk’s SpaceX on the satellite launch market.
The 98-metre, heavy-lift rocket launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2.03am on Thursday, five years later than originally planned and roughly an hour into its launch window.
The run-up to the launch had been tense. Blue Origin had to repeatedly postpone the flight due to bad weather in recent days. On Monday, after the rocket was fuelled and ready to fly, the mission was aborted due to an icing issue.
On Thursday, the countdown was halted just before lift-off after what Blue Origin described as a “wayward boat” strayed into the launch zone off the Florida coast.
But New Glenn finally lifted off in a plume of smoke, rising through cloud cover coloured a convenient corporate blue by the light from the rocket’s engines. Within four minutes the booster stage had separated, and about 13 minutes into the flight New Glenn achieved its goal of reaching orbit, to applause and cheers at Blue Origin’s mission control.
However, the attempt to return the booster to an ocean platform to prove the rocket’s reusability failed.
“Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is a bonus,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s head of in-space systems. Dave Limp, the company’s chief executive, added: “We did it! . . . On to spring and trying again on the landing.”
New Glenn’s debut flight paves the way for a new era in space flight, pitting two of the world’s richest men against each other in a race to extend humanity’s reach to the Moon and beyond.
Named after US astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, New Glenn aims to challenge the dominance of Musk’s SpaceX in the launch market. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets accounted for more than half the record 259 orbital launches globally during 2024.
New Glenn will also ferry satellites for Amazon’s proposed space-based broadband constellation, Project Kuiper, to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, and eventually Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander.
However, the rocket will face its own challenge as SpaceX prepares for the seventh test flight, also expected on Thursday, of its giant reusable Starship rocket.
Many industry participants expect Starship to drive down launch costs substantially when it becomes commercially operational.
New Glenn has one of the launch industry’s largest cargo bays, the part of the rocket known as the fairing, with a height of 22m and a diameter of 7m. Yet its payload capacity of 45 metric tonnes into low Earth orbit is a fraction of Starship’s capacity of up to 150 tonnes.
Moreover, while there is a shortage of launch capacity at the moment, management consultancy McKinsey has predicted that the arrival of Starship, New Glenn and other new rockets will lead to an oversupply from around 2028, putting more pressure on pricing.
The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven liquefied natural gas-fuelled BE-4 engines, generating more than 3.8mn pounds of thrust. Its second stage uses two smaller BE-3U engines fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
Announced in 2016, New Glenn was expected to fly before 2020. However, issues with the BE4 engines and significant changes to the rocket’s design stretched the programme’s timeline.
New Glenn also carries a demonstrator version of Blue Origin’s multifunctional Blue Ring spacecraft, designed to provide a range of mobility services in space. Sponsored by the US defence department’s innovation unit, the flight will test Blue Ring’s core flight, ground systems and operational capabilities.
Blue Origin has not disclosed the number of planned missions for New Glenn and there will be several more test flights before it enters service. However, it has said there are several New Glenn rockets in production, while customers include Nasa, direct-to-device satellite start-up AST SpaceMobile, several telecommunications providers and other US government groups.
