Bezos’ Blue Origin scrubs first launch of New Glenn rocket poised to challenge Musk’s SpaceX
Kyiv • UNN
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has postponed the debut orbital launch of its new 98-meter New Glenn rocket due to technical problems. The launch was planned to take place from Cape Canaveral, but after several delays, the mission was canceled.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will have to wait a bit longer for the long-awaited first orbital flight of its brand new rocket after a launch attempt was delayed for several hours before being canceled due to unspecified technical problems, AFP reports, UNN writes.
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The tallest, 98-meter rocket, named New Glenn in honor of legendary astronaut John Glenn, was to launch from the Cape Canaveral space station in a three-hour window starting at 1:00 am (06:00 GMT).
But the countdown was repeatedly stopped as teams tried to resolve the "anomalies" before the mission was officially "canceled" at around 3:10 a.m. - a common occurrence in the space industry, but disappointing for the hundreds of thousands of people who stayed up to watch the live broadcast.
"We are canceling today's launch attempt to troubleshoot a spacecraft subsystem that will put us outside our launch window," said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin's chief executive, in a webcast.
She added: "We are looking at opportunities for our next launch attempt.
"With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Bezos is setting his sights on the only person in the world richer than him: Elon Musk, whose SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market with its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, vital to the commercial sector, the Pentagon, and NASA," the publication says.
Bezos, who founded Blue Origin a quarter-century ago and celebrated his 61st birthday on Sunday, watched the developments from a nearby launch control room.
Musk, for his part, wished Blue Origin "good luck!" on X.
"SpaceX has been pretty much the only player for the last few years, and so having a competitor... is great," Scott Gabbard, a retired NASA official, told AFP, expecting competition to bring down costs.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship, its giant next-generation rocket, this week, raising the stakes in the competition.
When the New Glenn does fly, Blue Origin will try to land the first stage on an unmanned ship called Jacklyn, after Bezos' mother, deployed about 1,000 kilometers away in the Atlantic Ocean.
Although SpaceX has long made such landings an almost common sight, this will be Blue Origin's first attempt to land in the open sea.
Meanwhile, the upper stage of the rocket will launch its engines toward Earth orbit.
A prototype of an advanced spacecraft called the Blue Ring, funded by the US Department of Defense, which could one day travel to the solar system, will remain for an approximately six-hour test flight.
Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets used for suborbital tourism, but they are five times smaller and land on solid ground, not on a ship at sea.
The brilliant white New Glenn outperforms the Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads. It falls between the Falcon 9 and its larger "brother" Falcon Heavy in terms of payload capacity, but has the advantage of a wider payload fairing capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks, the publication writes.
Blue Origin has already received a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, an Internet satellite constellation designed to compete with Starlink.
However, SpaceX is still in the lead, while other competitors such as United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab are far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has been fascinated by space all his life.
But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions moving heavy industry off the planet to floating space platforms to preserve the Earth, the "blue beginning of humanity.
He founded Blue Origin in 2000-two years before Musk created SpaceX-but took a more cautious pace, in contrast to his competitor's "fail fast, learn fast" philosophy.