New Glenn: How Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Aims to Challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX

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At a Florida launch pad that has been dormant for nearly two decades, a new, roughly 320-foot (98-meter) rocket — developed by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin — is ready for its maiden flight.

The unmanned launch vehicle, called New Glenn, will mark Blue Origin’s first attempt to send a rocket into orbit, a feat necessary if the company hopes to chip away at SpaceX’s long-standing dominance in the industry.

New Glenn is ready to lift off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as early as next week.

The rocket, about the height of a 30-story building, consists of several parts: The first-stage rocket booster provides the initial thrust upon liftoff. On top of the booster is an upper rocket stage that includes a cargo compartment protected by a nose cone that will house experimental technology for this mission.

And in an effort to replicate the success SpaceX has found recycling rocket boosters over the past decade, Blue Origin will also aim to guide New Glenn’s first stage rocket booster back to a safe landing on a naval platform — named Jacklyn for Bezos’ mother – minutes after takeoff.

Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will seek to recover, refurbish and recycle first-stage rocket boosters to reduce costs.

For this initial mission, smooth flight is not guaranteed.

But the ultimate success of New Glenn, named after history NASA astronaut John Glennis instrumental in some of Blue Origin’s most ambitious goals.

The rocket could one day power national security launches, haul Amazon’s internet satellites into space and even help build one space station that Blue Origin develops with commercial partners.

Blue Origin formally announced the development of New Glenn — which aims to outperform SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets and haul spacecraft up to 45 tons (99,200 pounds) into orbit — in 2016.

The vehicle is long-awaited as the company had earlier targeted 2020 for its first launch.

However, delays are common in the aerospace industry. And the debut flight of a new vehicle is almost always significantly delayed.

Rocket companies also typically take a conservative approach to the first lift, launching dummy payloads such as pieces of metal or, as was the case with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy debut in 2018, an old one cherry red sports car.

Blue Origin has also branded itself as a company that aims to take a slow, painstaking approach to rocket development that doesn’t “cut any corners,” according to Bezos, who founded Blue Origin and funds the company.

The company’s mascot is a tortoise that pays tribute to the “tortoise and the hare” fable that made the mantra “slow and steady wins the race” a childhood staple.

“We believe that slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Bezos said in 2016. These comments could be seen as an attempt to position Blue Origin as the anti-SpaceX, which is known for embracing speed and trial-and-error over slow, painstaking development processes.

But SpaceX has definitely won the race to orbit. The company’s first orbital rocket, Falcon 1, made a successful launch in September 2008. The company has deployed hundreds of missions into orbit since then.

And while SpaceX routinely destroys rockets during test flights as it begins development of a new rocket, the company has a solid track record for operational missions. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, for example, has experienced two in-flight failures and a launch pad explosion, but no catastrophic incidents during human missions.

Until now, Blue Origin has been known mostly for its space tourism efforts, launching paying customers and celebrities on the New Shepard — a much smaller, suborbital rocket not powerful enough to launch satellites into space.

Of the more than 20 flights New Shepard has completed so far, the vehicle has experienced a malfunction during an unmanned science mission.

While SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and Bezos have been known for spars and bladder publicly about their rocket companiesMusk’s input on New Glenn’s debut so far has been positive: “Good speed!” he wrote on his social media platform X on December 27.

In some ways, New Glenn has already made its mark on the launch industry. Blue Origin has been pitching the rocket for years to compete with both SpaceX and United Launch Alliance – a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that buy engines from Blue Origin – for lucrative military launch contracts.

The US space force chose Blue Origin, ULA and SpaceX in June to compete for Pentagon contracts worth $5.6 billion for national security missions to be launched over the next four years.

Blue Origin also has agreements with several commercial companies to launch satellites. The contracts contain plans to help deploy Amazon’s Kuiper Internet satellites and a recently concluded agreement with AST SpaceMobile to help launch the Midland, Texas-based company’s space-based cellular broadband network.

New Glenn could also be instrumental in building Blue Origin’s planned space station, called Orbital Reef. Blue Origin and commercial partners, including Sierra Space and Boeing, among others, hope the station will one day provide a new destination for astronauts as the International Space Station is phased out.

New Glenn packs considerable power. Called a “heavy-lift” vehicle, its capabilities lie between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and the more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket.

SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, for example, can haul up to 22.8 tons (50,265 pounds) into space. While New Glenn is capable of carrying about twice that mass, it could also be roughly the same price as a Falcon 9: reportedly around $60 million to $70 million per launch.

“I think you have to go to compete with the Falcon 9 head-to-head or better on price,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, which provides data and analysis on the space sector.

The question, however, is whether Blue Origin will be able to maintain a competitive price, Henry added.

Still, one feature that makes the New Glenn stand out is its large payload fairing, or nose cone. The component protects the cargo space and is huge 23 feet (7 meters) wide – almost 2 meters larger than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy.

Henry said Blue Origin likely chose to equip New Glenn with such a large fairing to help fulfill Bezos’ future vision.

The tech billionaire has long described a desire to one day move manufacturing and other polluting, “heavy” industries off Earth, leaving our home planet as a kind of national park for people to visit and enjoy. And to do that he would need rockets that can carry huge objects.

Although the New Glenn overpowers the Falcon 9, SpaceX is developing the cutting-edge flagship of its rocket arsenal.

Like Bezos, SpaceX’s Musk has his own concept for our future in space, where humans live and work on other planets, especially Mars. To help realize this vision, SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built. The nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket dwarfs New Glenn in every sense: Musk has said he hopes Starship will tow up to 300 tons into orbit.

SpaceX has billed the Starship as a rocket that could make all others obsolete because it aims to drastically reduce the cost per kilogram of getting cargo (or people) into space. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, Henry noted.

“But I think if SpaceX continues to lower the cost of access to space, they will always be the No. 1 competitor,” Henry said.

Blue Origin had planned to launch a pair of Mars-bound satellites on behalf of NASA for the first flight of New Glenn.

But delays with the rocket’s development prompted the space agency to change course and move that flight to this spring at the earliest. So for this first flight, Blue Origin chose instead to fly a “demonstrator” that will test the technology needed for the company’s proposed Blue Ring spacecraft — which will aim to serve as a kind of in-space rideshare vehicle, that pulls satellites deeper into space when needed.

The demonstrator on this New Glenn flight will remain aboard the rocket for the entire six-hour flight, Blue Origin saidand it will validate “orbit-to-ground communications capabilities” as well as “test its in-space telemetry, tracking and command hardware, and ground-based radiometric tracking.”

The Blue Ring Explorer demonstrator is part of an agreement with Blue Origin US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Similar to SpaceX, Blue Origin aims to restore and restore its first-stage rocket boosters in an effort to make launches cheaper.

“Reusability is integral to radically reducing costs per launch,” the company said in a recent press release, using the same oft-repeated sentiment that SpaceX has touted since it began landing rocket boosters in 2015.

However, Bezos has recognized the importance of recycling rocket parts since he founded the company in 2000 — two years before Musk established SpaceX. And the company has already developed its suborbital New Shepard tourism rocket to be reusable.

“It’s not a copy-cat game,” Henry said. “Blue Origin has been pursuing reusable vehicles since before reusable vehicles were cool. Now it’s much more of a mainstream idea (because of SpaceX). The difference is that it’s taken Blue Origin so much longer to get into orbit.”

If successful, returning the New Glenn rocket booster to a safe landing will be an amazing feat. After using most of its fuel to propel the rocket’s upper stage to space, the first stage booster must make a clean separation. The booster must then maneuver with precise guidance and re-ignite its engines with precise timing to avoid crashing into the sea or the Jacklyn recovery platform.