Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket, the company’s first SpaceX challenger

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Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, on Thursday achieved one of the most significant successes in its history: sending a rocket into orbit.

The debut flight of New Glenn, the company’s first rocket powerful enough to launch satellites into space, lifted off after 1 p.m. 2 ET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Demonstration technology on board the rocket, called Blue Ring Pathfinder, was safely carried into orbit – making the mission a success.

But Blue Origin fell short of its bonus goal of guiding a portion of the New Glenn rocket, called the first-stage booster, back to a safe landing on a naval platform after takeoff.

This maneuver, designed to allow Blue Origin to refurbish and reuse rocket boosters — much like SpaceX does with its Falcon rockets — aims to save money and reduce the cost of launches.

As the countdown clock hit zero, New Glenn ignited its seven engines and raised the launch pad. The first stage, or lower part of the rocket, fired its engines for more than three minutes before detaching from New Glenn’s upper part.

The first-stage booster then attempted to guide itself back to a precise landing aboard the Jacklyn, a naval platform that Bezos named after his mother. But as the booster was set to reignite its engines for touchdown, live data from the rocket was cut off, and Blue Origin webcast hosts were left to guess what might have happened. The hosts later confirmed that the booster was lost.

The recovery maneuver was an attempt to replicate what Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been doing with its rockets for a decade.

SpaceX, which now routinely lands its Falcon 9 rocket boosters on pads on land and at sea, tried and failed four times to accomplish the task when it first developed the maneuver in the mid-2010s.

The rest of New Glenn’s debut launch appeared to go off without a hitch. The full mission is expected to last around six hours and conclude around 8:00 AM ET.

After separating from the first stage, the upper part of the New Glenn rocket, which carried the experimental Blue Ring technology, ignited its own engine and continued to propel itself into orbit.

After reaching space, the rocket shed its payload fairing, a shell-like structure designed to shield satellites during launch. And the second stage continued to fire its engines until it reached orbital speeds — which are typically more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour), more than 22 times the speed of sound.

The exposed Blue Ring demonstrator should remain attached to New Glenn’s upper stage for the duration of the mission rather than detaching from the rocket as a satellite typically would.

The triumphant show from New Glenn could set the rocket up for an exciting year. NASA intends to use the vehicle to send two orbiters to Mars.

Blue Origin also has a number of commercial missions on its manifesto, including plans to help deploy Amazon’s constellation of Internet satellites and send space-based cellular broadband satellites to AST SpaceMobile.

The Blue Ring technology demonstration that Blue Origin is flying on this mission is also a precursor to a vehicle that the company hopes will one day serve as a kind of Uber ride in space, pulling satellites deeper into space when needed.

“Blue Ring addresses two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today: growing space infrastructure and the need for increased mobility in space,” according to Blue Origin’s website. “The spacecraft’s ability to maneuver to multiple orbits and locations, deploy and host payloads, and perform onboard computing and communications will enable ground-breaking missions for a variety of customers.”

Blue Origin expects Blue Ring vehicles to be able to tow massive satellites weighing up to about 6,600 pounds (3,000 kg).

The Blue Ring spacecraft, launched Thursday, is also part of an agreement Blue Origin has entered into with the U.S. Department of Defense’s The Defense Innovation Unit .