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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises up from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a pillar of bluish flame. (Photo Courtesy of Trevor Mahlmann)
For the first time ever, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put a payload in orbit, using its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket.
The two-stage rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:03 a.m. ET Thursday (11:03 p.m. PT tonight). Cheers could be heard coming from Blue Origin employees watching the launch.
After stage separation, New Glenn’s first-stage booster executed an autonomous descent with the aim of landing on a barge stationed hundreds of miles offshore.
The booster, nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” missed the target. “We did in fact lose the booster,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said. Landing the booster would have been a bonus, but it wasn’t considered a requirement for mission success.
The prime objective of the mission, known as NG-1, was to test the communications and control systems for Blue Ring, a multi-mission space mobility platform that’s under development at Blue Origin.
For Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin, and for Bezos, the mere fact that New Glenn made it to orbit was at least as significant as the Blue Ring Pathfinder test. Although the company has launched smaller New Shepard rockets on suborbital spaceflights for a decade, it had never before put a payload into Earth orbit.
That changed tonight.
NG-1’s success is expected to open the way for a host of applications that Blue Origin aims to support — ranging from satellite constellations to moon missions to a commercial space station.
“We need to lower the cost of access to space … and that’s what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about,” Bezos said at the DealBook Summit in December.
Success could also mean more competition for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which currently dominates the orbital launch industry. SpaceX has already launched its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets eight times this month, and is due to conduct the seventh flight test of its super-heavy-lift Starship launch system in Texas on Thursday.
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.
Since then, Bezos has spent billions of dollars funding Blue Origin, with most of that money going toward New Glenn.
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.
A long-exposure photo shows Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket streaking into the sky from its Florida launch pad. (Photo Courtesy of Trevor Mahlmann)
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Dave Limp monitor the progress of the New Glenn rocket’s flight at Mission Control. (Blue Origin via YouTube)
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. And on Monday, the first attempt to launch New Glenn had to be scrubbed due to a technical problem. Blue Origin attributed that scrub to “ice forming in a purge line on an auxiliary power unit that powers some of our hydraulic systems.” The issue was resolved in time for tonight’s launch.
NG-1’s primary payload was Blue Ring Pathfinder, which was designed to demonstrate the technologies that Blue Origin is incorporating in its Blue Ring vehicle. The development effort is supported by a Defense Innovation Unit program aimed at facilitating greater in-space mobility for the Pentagon. NG-1 will also serve as Blue Origin’s first certification flight for the National Security Space Launch program.
The rocket’s second stage sent the payload into a highly elliptical orbit that ranged from 1,490 to 12,000 miles (2,400 to 19,300 kilometers) in altitude. That orbit was meant to test the capabilities of the in-space system at those heights. The pathfinder test was expected to last about six hours, and then the second stage would be put into a safe parking orbit.
New Glenn’s first-stage booster is designed to fly itself to an at-sea touchdown on a landing platform vessel that’s been christened Jacklyn as a tribute to Jeff Bezos’ mother. Before tonight’s launch, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp acknowledged that the maneuver might fall short for NG-1, but he emphasized that the mission’s success wouldn’t depend on whether or not the booster stuck the landing.
“Our objective is to reach orbit. Anything beyond that is a bonus,” Limp said in a posting to X. “Landing our booster offshore is ambitious — but we’re going for it. No matter what, we will learn a lot.”
There will be more opportunities to recover New Glenn boosters in the months ahead. Blue Origin says it has several New Glenn vehicles in production at its Florida factory, and has filled out a “full customer manifest.”
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.
Thanks to launch photographer Trevor Mahlmann for permission to publish his images of the New Glenn launch. For more from Mahlmann, check out TMahlmann.com.
