Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launches massive rocket on first test flight
Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida carrying a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth
Cape Canaveral: Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight on Thursday, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.
Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.
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Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-metre) rocket carried an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits.
For this test, the satellite was expected to remain inside the second stage while circling Earth. The mission was expected to last six hours, with the second stage then placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA’s practices for minimising space junk. The first-stage booster aimed to land on a barge in the Atlantic minutes after liftoff so it could be recycled.
New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn on Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.
Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which honours John Glenn, is five times taller.
Blue Origin poured more than USD 1 billion into New Glenn’s launch site, rebuilding historic Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pad is 14 kilometres from the company’s control centres and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre.
Bezos — taking part in the launch from Mission Control — declined to disclose his personal investment in the programme. He said he does not see Blue Origin in a competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator. Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, if everything goes well, with the next one coming up this spring.
“There’s room for lots of winners” Bezos said from the rocket factory over the weekend, adding that this was the “very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry … to lower the cost of access to space.” New Glenn is the latest in a series of big, new rockets to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s upgraded Ariane 6 and NASA’s Space Launch System or SLS, the space agency’s successor to the Saturn V for sending astronauts to the moon.
