Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission to space, a first step into orbit for Jeff Bezos’ space company, which aims to compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch business.
New Glenn is 30 stories tall and features a reusable first stage. The launch occurred around 2 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Its seven engines roared under cloudy skies on their second takeoff attempt this week.
Hundreds of employees at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Washington, and at the rocket factory in Cape Canaveral, Florida, roared with applause as Blue Origin vice president Ariane Cornell announced that the rocket’s second stage had entered orbit and with it reached a long-awaited milestone.
“We have achieved our No. 1 most important, critical objective and have safely entered orbit,” Cornell said in a company livestream. “And y’all, we did it on the first try.”
The rocket’s reusable first stage booster was scheduled to land on a barge in the Atlantic after separating from the second stage, but failed to make that landing, Cornell confirmed. The booster’s telemetry failed a few minutes after launch.
“In fact, we lost the booster,” Cornell said.
The mission is the culmination of a decades-long, multibillion-dollar development journey and marks Blue Origin’s first trip into Earth orbit since Bezos founded the company 25 years ago.
Bezos told Reuters on Sunday ahead of Blue Origin’s first launch attempt that he was extremely nervous before the booster landed.
But he added that delaying the landing would be the “icing on the cake” if they managed to reach the milestone of putting the payload into the intended orbit.
Secured in New Glenn’s payload bay for the mission is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, an agile spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.
The rocket’s first attempt to launch failed
The rocket’s first launch attempt on Monday was aborted early in the morning because ice had accumulated on a fuel line. On Thursday, the company said there were no issues before the launch.
Bezos monitored the launch from a few miles away in Blue Origin’s mission control room, wearing a large headset and flanked by dozens of launch personnel. Sitting next to him was the company’s CEO, Dave Limp.
New Glenn is expected to advance a backlog of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network, which will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service.
New Glenn is the latest U.S. rocket to hit the market in recent years as governments and private companies ramp up their space programs and compete to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and his workhorse Falcon 9.
NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket had a successful debut in 2022, as did last year’s Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, the joint launch company between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
New Glenn is approximately twice as powerful as Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, and the payload bay diameter is twice as large to accommodate larger quantities of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the launch price of the rocket. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.
New Glenn’s development spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industry giant.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Musk wrote to Bezos on X early Thursday.
SpaceX’s massive, next-generation Starship rocket under development, with which New Glenn will also compete, is expected to further disrupt the industry with cheap flights to space and full reusability.
Bezos began speeding things up at Blue Origin in late 2023 by prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, which employees said conveyed a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.