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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket stands on its Florida launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture counted down to the final hour tonight, but in the end, the company had to postpone the first-ever orbital launch of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket due to a stubborn technical glitch.
The launch from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was scrubbed a few minutes after 3 a.m. ET (midnight PT). Tonight’s three-hour launch window was due to close at 4 a.m. ET.
“We are standing down today’s launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said. “We are reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt.”
Liftoff had already been delayed twice over the past few days due to concerns about rough seas in the area of the Atlantic where New Glenn’s first-stage booster was slated to land — and the fact that the seas had settled down raised hopes that the launch could take place tonight. But it was not to be.
Whenever it takes place, this would be a milestone launch for more than one reason: Although Blue Origin has been launching much smaller New Shepard rockets on suborbital spaceflights for a decade, it has never tried putting a payload into Earth orbit. That would change with New Glenn’s liftoff.
It would also be the first launch in 20 years to take place at Launch Complex 36, which previously hosted Atlas rocket launches and has been leased by Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin since 2015.
New Glenn’s origin story goes back to 2012. Three years into the design and development effort, Bezos made a splash when he announced that the orbital-class rocket, named after pioneering NASA astronaut John Glenn, would be built at a 750,000-square-foot Florida factory and launched from Cape Canaveral.
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Dave Limp monitor the countdown to the New Glenn rocket’s launch from Mission Control. (Blue Origin via YouTube)
The rocket stands more than 320 feet (98 meters) high and features a 7-meter (23-foot-wide) payload fairing, which Blue Origin says can provide twice the volume of a standard 5-meter fairing. An entire New Shepard rocket could fit within the fairing, with room to spare on the sides.
New Glenn’s first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, fueled with liquefied natural gas. The second stage makes use of two hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines. Maximum thrust at liftoff is 3.8 million pounds, which is about half the thrust that was generated by the Saturn V moon rockets of the Apollo era. The rocket should be able to put up to 99,000 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit, which is 50 percent more than NASA’s space shuttle could carry.
The road to space hasn’t always run smooth. For example, Blue Origin had to overcome problems that were encountered during development of New Glenn’s BE-4 rocket engines. Success is by no means guaranteed.
The prime objective of this mission, known as NG-1, is to reach orbit safely with Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, a technology demonstration payload that’s designed to test the telemetry, communications and control systems for the company’s Blue Ring multi-mission space mobility platform.
The test mission is part of the Defense Innovation Unit’s campaign to facilitate greater in-space mobility for the Pentagon. NG-1 will also serve as Blue Origin’s first certification flight for the Pentagon’s National Security Space Launch program.
New Glenn’s second stage is slated to send the payload into a highly elliptical orbit that ranges from 1,490 to 12,000 miles (2,400 to 19,300 kilometers) in altitude. That unusual orbit is meant to test the capabilities of the in-space system and the ground-based infrastructure at those orbital heights.
Seahawks fans set up chairs on a beach south of Port Canaveral’s Jetty Park to catch a glimpse of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket in the far distance. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
The first-stage booster is designed to fly itself to an at-sea landing, hundreds of miles offshore, on a custom-built barge that’s been christened Jacklyn as a tribute to Jeff Bezos’ mother. But sea conditions have to be calm enough for a safe landing, and over the past week, the conditions had twice been judged too rough to proceed.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp emphasized that the test mission’s success won’t depend on whether or not the booster sticks the landing. “Our objective is to reach orbit. Anything beyond that is a bonus,” Limp said in posting to X. “Landing our booster offshore is ambitious — but we’re going for it. No matter what, we will learn a lot.”
If New Glenn meets with success, that would mean more competition for SpaceX, which currently dominates the launch industry. Blue Origin says it has several New Glenn vehicles in production at its Florida factory, and has filled out a “full customer manifest” for launches in the months ahead.
High-profile missions include satellite launches to low Earth orbit for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and for AST SpaceMobile’s space-based cellular network. Looking farther out, New Glenn is due to launch twin orbiters to Mars for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission.
This is an updated version of a report first published on Jan. 11.
