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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket stands on its Florida launch pad. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is once again gearing up for the first-ever orbital launch of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, buoyed by a more favorable weather forecast.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station has 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 is slated to land. But those seas are expected to settle down for tonight’s launch attempt.
“Weather (including sea states) looks much more favorable for this new window,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a posting to the X social-media platform. The overall forecast sets the chances for acceptable weather at 90%, with a reduced risk of high seas in the offshore landing zone.
Tonight’s three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. ET Monday (10 p.m. PT Sunday). Blue Origin plans to stream coverage of the countdown via its website starting about an hour before liftoff.
This is 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’s due to change with New Glenn’s liftoff.
It will 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.
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.
This chart traces the stages of New Glenn’s planned flight. Click on the image for a larger version. (Blue Origin Infographic)
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 orbit is presumably intended to test the capabilities of the in-space system and the ground-based infrastructure at those orbital heights.
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 to allow for a safe landing, and over the past week, the conditions have twice been judged too rough to proceed. The latest forecast calls for 5- to 6-foot waves in the landing zone, which is just within Blue Origin’s parameters.
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,” the Blue Origin CEO 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.
