Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin reaches orbit in 1st New Glenn launch, misses booster landing

Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission to space, a first step into Earth orbit for Jeff Bezos’ space company as it aims to compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch business.

Thirty stories tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 02:00 ET from Blue Origin’s launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines thundering under cloudy skies on its second launch attempt this week.

Hundreds of employees at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and its rocket factory in Cape Canaveral, Fla., roared with applause as Blue Origin vice president Ariane Cornell announced the rocket’s second stage reached orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.

“We hit our most important, critical objective No. 1, we’re going to orbit safely,” Cornell said on a company livestream. “And you guys, we did it on our first trip.”

The rocket’s reusable first-stage booster was supposed to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage, but failed to land, Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster blacked out minutes after liftoff.

“We actually lost the booster,” Cornell said.

The culmination of a decades-long, multibillion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first trek into Earth orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company.

Bezos told Reuters on Sunday, before Blue Origin’s first launch attempt, that he was most nervous about landing the booster.

But he added that it would be “icing on the cake” if they could reach the milestone of getting the payload to its intended orbit.

Secured inside New Glenn’s payload bay for the mission 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.

Rocket’s first launch attempt was scrubbed

The rocket’s first attempt to launch on Monday was scrubbed early that morning because ice had accumulated on a propellant line. On Thursday, the company cited no problems ahead of 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. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, was next to him.

New Glenn is expected to push forward with a backlog of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network that will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service.

New Glenn is the latest American rocket to debut in recent years as governments and private companies ramp up their space programs and race to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its workhorse Falcon 9.

NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket made a successful debut in 2022, as did the Vulcan rocket last year from the United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint launch project.

New Glenn is about twice as powerful as the Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, with a payload bay diameter that is twice as large to fit larger batches of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the rocket’s launch prices. The Falcon 9 starts at about $62 million US.

The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin executives and has faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut.

“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Musk wrote to Bezos on X early Thursday.

SpaceX’s giant, next-generation Starship rocket under development, which New Glenn will also compete with, is expected to further shake up the industry with low-cost trips to space and full reusability.

Bezos in late 2023 moved to speed things up at Blue Origin, prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, which employees say introduced a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.