Bezos’ Big Rocket Is Finally Ready for Liftoff This Week (Image Credit: Gizmodo-com)
After years of delays, the launch of Blue Origin’s long-anticipated New Glenn rocket is set for this week, beginning a new era of competition between two rocket billionaires.
New Glenn is scheduled for liftoff no earlier than Friday, January 10 during a three-hour launch window that opens at 1 a.m. ET, Blue Origin announced on Monday. The rocket will take off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, carrying Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder for its first test flight. New Glenn’s inaugural launch will double as the rocket’s certification flight, paving the way for it to carry national security payloads on future missions.
“This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice president of New Glenn, said in a statement. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.“
Blue Origin, founded by the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, has been developing the $2.5 billion New Glenn rocket for nearly a decade. The rocket, originally scheduled for its debut launch in 2020, suffered several delays, however, largely to do with the development of its engines. New Glenn relies on seven BE-4 engines, designed by Blue Origin, which have required extensive testing and redesign.
With the upcoming debut of New Glenn, Blue Origin can officially compete with industry favorite SpaceX, further fueling the rivalry between Bezos and his billionaire nemesis Elon Musk. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is a reusable suborbital rocket mainly used to launch space tourists on brief journeys above the Karman Line (the demarcation of space), doing so for the first time in July 2021. New Glenn, on the other hand, is a partially reusable, heavy-lift rocket capable of lifting 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit. The 313-foot-tall (95-meter) rocket has a reusable first stage, powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines. By comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable, heavy-lift rocket capable of carrying 63 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 26 metric tons to geostationary orbit.
New Glenn’s first payload, Blue Ring, is a spacecraft platform designed to provide “end-to-end services that span hosting, transportation, refueling, data relay, and logistics, including an ‘in-space’ cloud computing capability,” according to Blue Origin. It’s been aptly described as a “space truck, and will eventually serve both commercial and government customers, and host payloads weighing up to 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms).
The rocket was originally scheduled to launch in November 2024, carrying a pair of NASA probes to Mars as part of its debut flight. The space agency halted preparations for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission in September out of fear that New Glenn wouldn’t be ready in time. Instead, Blue Origin agreed to move up New Glenn’s second flight to accommodate the Mars mission’s launch window later this year.
Bezos’ space company finally got it together last year, moving ahead with preparations for New Glenn’s debut. The company replaced Bob Smith as CEO, hiring former Amazon exec David Limp in his position. Blue Origin also announced that it’s planning an uncrewed landing on the Moon in 2025 using a prototype version of its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander, potentially beating SpaceX to the lunar surface—emphasis on “potentially.”
