A quarter century after its founding, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is finally ready for its first orbital trip with a new rocket the company hopes will shake up the commercial space race.
Blue Origin posted on Twitter that the launch, initially scheduled for Sunday, had been pushed back a day due to “adverse” sea conditions.
Named New Glenn after a famous astronaut, the rocket is 320 feet (98 meters) tall, roughly equivalent to a 32-story building — and it’s set to launch into a launch window from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Which now opens at 1 o’clock. :00 AM (0600 GMT) Monday.
“Pointy End!” Company CEO Dave Limp posted on Twitter with photos of the gleaming white giant.
With the mission, called NG-1, Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, is taking direct aim at the world’s richest man: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Is.
These commercial sectors serve the Pentagon and the US space agency NASA – which, crucially, involves ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
“For the last several years SpaceX has been the only game in town, and so to have a competitor… it’s great,” G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship – its giant new-generation rocket – for the very next day, heightening the sense of high-stakes rivalry.
landing attempt
If all goes according to plan, shortly after launch, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first stage booster on a drone ship named Jacqueline, in honor of Bezos’s mother, about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) in the Atlantic Ocean. Posted at a distance of.
Although SpaceX has long made such landings an almost routine spectacle, this will be Blue Origin’s first shot at a touchdown on the high seas.
Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, with a Defense Department-funded prototype spacecraft called Blue Ring onboard for a test flight of about six hours.
Limp stressed that reaching orbit is the main goal, while successfully recovering the booster would be a welcome “bonus”.
Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets – which are used for suborbital tourism – but they are much smaller and land on terra firma rather than on a ship in the ocean.
Physically, the New Glenn dwarfs the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.
It lies between the Falcon 9 and its bigger brother, the Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity, but has the edge with its wider payload fairing, which is ideal for transporting much heavier cargo.
slow vs fast growth
Blue Origin has already won a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes at New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.
However, for now, SpaceX maintains a strong lead, while other rivals – United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab – lag far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space. But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions moving heavy industry off the planet to floating space platforms to preserve Earth, “humanity’s blue core.”
He founded Blue Origin in 2000 – two years before Musk created SpaceX – but has adopted a more cautious pace, in contrast to his rival’s “fail fast, learn fast” philosophy.
“There is an impatience within the space community with Blue Origin’s very deliberate approach,” Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University and a former member of the National Space Council, told AFP.
If New Glenn is successful, Pace said, it would give the U.S. government “unequivocal redundancy” — valuable backups if one system fails.
Musk’s closeness to President-elect Donald Trump has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, especially with private astronaut Jared Isaacman – a business associate of Musk – who is set to become the next NASA chief.
However, Bezos is making his proposal while paying tribute to his former foe during a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, while Amazon has said it will donate $1 million to the inaugural committee.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
