Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is set for the inaugural launch of its giant New Glenn rocket on Sunday, a long-awaited first leap into Earth orbit that poses one of the biggest challenges yet to the industry dominance enjoyed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Is one of.
Standing 30 stories tall, New Glenn has been a key focus for Blue Origin since the beginning of its decade-long development, part of a billion-dollar effort to meet demand for satellite constellation launches and snatch market share from SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. represents.
If successful in its launch, New Glenn could later begin launching Kuiper, Amazon’s broadband internet satellite constellation that will rival SpaceX’s Starlink network, intensifying competition on another front.
Blue Origin has launched and landed its very small, reusable New Shepard rocket from the edge of Earth’s atmosphere for years. It has yet to send anything into orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company to support “the millions of people working and living in space.”
That may change this week, but success is not guaranteed with the new rockets.
New Glenn is scheduled to launch Sunday at 1 p.m. ET (0600 GMT) from the company’s launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending its first Blue Ring satellite into orbit — designed for satellite servicing and national security missions in space. Gone is a moving spacecraft. ,
Compared to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, New Glenn is nearly twice as powerful with a payload bay diameter larger enough to fit larger batches of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the launch price of the rocket. The price of the Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.
However, New Glenn will not be as powerful as SpaceX’s next-generation Starship, a fully reusable rocket system in development that Musk sees as key to expanding Starlink’s footprint in orbit. Starship will attempt to deploy simulated satellites in its next test flight this month.
‘Found a lovely place’
Dozens of launches and millions of dollars sit in New Glenn’s dock. Blue Origin has booked multi-launch deals with Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Canada’s Telesat and satellite-to-cellular device company AST SpaceMobile.
“New Glenn’s got a good location that has enabled them to get more customers than anyone else at this time,” said Caleb Henry, satellite and launch analyst at Quilty Analytics, about the space company’s potential in the satellite constellation. “
SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which ignited the industry’s reusability trend for its cost-saving potential, took the early stages of the rocket’s core stage by returning it to the ocean during development a decade ago, before attempting landings on drone ships. Landing attempts made.
New Glenn’s reusable core stage will make its first landing attempt on the drone ship a few minutes after takeoff.
New Glenn’s arduous development involved three CEOs and sometimes slowed as Blue Origin took on other ambitious projects, such as building a moon lander for NASA.
As much of the Western world becomes increasingly dependent on SpaceX for access to space, Bezos moved New Glenn to New Glenn by replacing Blue Origin’s CEO with Dave Limp, a deputy from Amazon’s devices unit, to speed things up in late 2023. Tried to get out of growth paralysis.
According to several employees, Blue Origin engineers felt the urgency from the top.
A Blue Origin employee said, “We’ve never had an entire company focused so aggressively on one thing before.” “It’s been everyone’s mission to get to this first launch basically every day for the last year.”
The New Glenn will also compete with the less-powerful Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed that plans a stronger Vulcan version in the future.
Sunday’s launch is also a key certification flight required by the U.S. Space Force before New Glenn can launch national security payloads on missions that are up for grabs in a billion-dollar procurement competition for prizes later this year. Expect to win.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
