Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin reaches orbit on New Glenn’s first launch, missing the booster landing

Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission into space, the inaugural step for Jeff Bezos’ space company into Earth orbit as it aims to rival SpaceX in the field of satellite launches.

New Glenn, thirty stories tall with a reusable first stage, launched at around 2 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines roaring under overcast skies on its second attempt at liftoff this week. .

Hundreds of employees at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Washington, and its rocket factory in Cape Canaveral, Florida, cheered when Blue Origin Vice President Arian Cornell announced that the rocket’s second stage had reached orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.

“We achieved our main and critical goal No. 1, and reached orbit safely,” Cornell said in the company’s live broadcast. “And we did that on our first trip.”

Cornell confirmed that the rocket’s reusable first-stage booster was scheduled to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage, but failed to make that landing. Telemetry from the booster disappeared minutes after liftoff.

“We actually lost a booster,” Cornell said.

The culmination of a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first flight to 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 very nervous about landing the booster.

But he added that committing to the landing would be “the icing on the cake” if they could achieve the goal of getting the payload to its intended orbit.

Secured inside the payload bay of New Glenn for the mission is a prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring spacecraft, a maneuverable spacecraft that the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.

The first launch attempt of the missile was cancelled

The first attempt to launch the rocket on Monday was canceled early that morning due to ice buildup on the thrust line. On Thursday, the company did not mention any problems ahead of the launch.

Bezos watched the launch from a few kilometers away in Blue Origin’s mission control room, wearing a large headset and surrounded by dozens of launch crew. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, was by his side.

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

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

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

New Glenn is nearly twice as powerful as the Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, and has a payload bay diameter twice as large to accommodate larger constellations of satellites. Blue Origin did not reveal the launch price of the missile. The Falcon 9 starts at around US$62 million.

New Glenn’s development involved three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industrial giant.

“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first try!” Musk wrote to Bezos 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 cheap flights to space and full reusability.

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