Close to 10 years after it first sent a rocket to space, Blue Origin put one into Earth’s orbit when it launched its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral at 2:03 a.m. Eastern Thursday.
The 322-foot-tall, two-stage launch vehicle slowly eased off the pad at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and then steadily accelerated upwards, its seven BE-4 methane-fueled engines leaving a trail of bright blue and purple fire.
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About three minutes later, the booster’s one job was done, followed by stage separation and the second stage taking its payload—a pathfinder version of the Jeff Bezos-owned company’s Blue Ring satellite-servicing spacecraft—onwards towards orbit.
Thirteen minutes after launch, the second stage’s two BE-3U hydrogen-fueled engines had completed their job.
That’s no easy task: Blue Origin now stands as the first private space-launch company in the West to reach orbit on its first attempt with a rocket of its own design. SpaceX needed four tries with its Falcon 1 rocket, Rocket Lab needed two for its Electron, and other, smaller, US space startups have seen their would-be debuts end with one anomaly or another.
(The NASA-designed Space Launch System reached orbit on its first attempt in November 2022, but that massive rocket was built with billions of taxpayer dollars and flight–proven Space Shuttle engines and boosters.)
The second job for New Glenn’s first stage—landing on a barge named Jacklyn after Bezos’s mother—did not go as well. Telemetry from the booster froze after it began its reentry burn, with the last figures putting it at 4,285mph and an 84,226-foot altitude.
New Glenn’s night launch apparently made for some impressive viewing. (Credit: Gregg Newton/Getty Images)
Launch commentator Ariane Cornell, vice president of Blue Origin’s in-space systems business unit, confirmed the loss of the booster on a livestream after the second-stage cutoff. The company’s announcement of the launch quoted CEO Dave Limp saying “We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring.”
Sticking the booster’s landing on a first attempt would have been even less likely than reaching orbit without a practice run. SpaceX needed three tries to land a Falcon 9 booster after four years of successful launches, although it has since made powered touchdowns a routine end to hundreds of launches.
Blue Origin has itself accumulated practice landing rockets with the single-stage, suborbital New Shepard rocket that had been its only machine to reach space until Thursday, and which took Bezos to space on its crewed debut in July 2021. But New Glenn is vastly larger and more powerful than New Shepard.
Blue Origin says this rocket—named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth—can carry almost 50 tons of payload to low Earth orbit and put more than 14 tons into geostationary orbit. That puts it into competition with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, but not that company’s far larger, still in-development Starship that’s due to have its seventh test launch Thursday afternoon.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tipped his cap on X to Bezos, posting: “Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Then Musk got back to amplifying conspiracy theories about OpenAI and the Los Angeles wildfires.
New Glenn’s liftoff was originally set for Friday after a long slog of development, then delayed for unfriendly weather, then scrubbed early Monday morning after frost developed in a purge line. Thursday’s launch then got pushed back by about half an hour when a boat strayed into the keep-away zone designed offshore for mariners’ safety.
Blue Origin can’t be the only organization where people are feeling relieved to see this rocket fly: Other firms as well as government agencies have a lot riding on New Glenn’s potential.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper booked 12 New Glenn flights as part of a massive launch order announced in 2022. AST SpaceMobile will take advantage of New Glenn’s capacity to launch many of its large BlueBird broadband satellites. And the lunar lander that NASA ordered from Blue Origin as an alternate to a version of SpaceX’s Starship will fly on New Glenn.
Those ambitions look more real after Thursday’s debut.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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