The basic building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to go.
A New Glenn rocket – built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the dark before dawn on Sunday, it may go into space for the first time.
“This is long overdue,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is making big money. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have significantly lowered the cost of sending things into space, they are wary of relying on a company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest man.
“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There has to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it appears that Blue Origin is perhaps best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rocket, but not as large as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system SpaceX is currently developing.
Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon and a space tug called Blue Ring – a vehicle that can move satellites into Earth orbit.
Mr. Bezos’s other company — the giant online retailer Amazon — also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of Internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Mr. Bezos, the world’s second-richest person after Mr. Musk, also speaks grandly of a future where millions of people live and work in space, of endless cylindrical habitats that rotate to provide artificial gravity, and of moving polluting industries in space. a day to allow the Earth to return to a more pristine state.
“I know it sounds fantastic,” Mr. Bezos said during an interview at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December, “so I’m asking this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it’s not fantastic.”
But these plans and hopes cannot get off the ground without a rocket. “That’s what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about,” Mr. Bezos said.
The 21st century space age is often described as a race of billionaires rather than nations, but so far it hasn’t been a race at all. SpaceX, which Mr. Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put anything into orbit.
“I think a lot of people forget that Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Mr. Harrison said.
Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, the New Shepard, which goes up and down. It passes the 62-mile high altitude considered the edge of space, but never comes close to reaching the speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour needed to enter orbit around the planet. New Shepard flights have provided several minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Mr. Bezos himself, and for scientific experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses Blue Origin engines for the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which was successfully launched twice last year.
In 2015, with pomp and publicity, Mr. Bezos announced plans for the then-unnamed rocket.
Mr. Bezos said it would be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin would build in Florida near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He vowed to launch by the end of the decade.
The factory appeared—giant boxy buildings painted the firm’s bright blue—but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach Earth’s orbit, did not.
Blue Origin continued to push back the rocket’s debut date.
During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president at Blue Origin who oversees New Glenn development, said he expected “multiple” New Glenn launches in 2024. While touring the Blue Origin factory in February 2024. he said he expected two releases by the end of the year.
The delays continued. The debut flight of New Glenn, which would carry two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to take measurements of the Martian atmosphere, was due to launch in October.
But in September, NASA, doubtful that New Glenn would be ready in time, announced that it had withdrawn ESCAPADE from that inaugural launch.
Blue Origin said a prototype of the Blue Ring, the space shuttle, would fly instead. In early December, the complete rocket went to the launch site.
Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a launch license. It finally came on December 27th.
Later that day, Blue Origin performed a launch test, with the clock counting down to zero and the rocket’s engines firing and sending out streams of flame and smoke. But, as intended, the rocket remained tightly clamped and after 24 seconds, the engines shut down – a final test to sift through and fix the faults.
As soon as 1 a.m. ET on January 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down the engines, New Glenn will blast off into space. The midnight launch window, which runs until 4 a.m., results from air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on a large, untested missile.
The hope is that New Glenn’s debut is better late than never.
Last year, Mr. Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could accelerate its pace to one launch a month in 2025 and eventually double that or more.
No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launch of a new vehicle so quickly.
“This is very fundamental,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of BryceTech, a space consulting company in Alexandria, Va. But if Blue Origin can’t keep up at the promised pace, its customers could also be left behind.
Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, the New Glenn is intended to be partly reusable, with the booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform called the Jacklyn, according to Mr. Bezos’ mother.
For the first flight, the booster was given the nickname So you’re telling me it has a chance.
On social media site X, Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, explained: “Why? No one has set up a reusable booster on the first try. However, we are going for it, and we humbly submit having good faith in its landing. But as I said a few weeks ago, if we don’t, we’ll learn and keep trying until we do.”
Mr Harrison said the reusable boosters, designed to be launched at least 25 times, would help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket currently only fly once and fall into the ocean.
The second stage, which goes into orbit with the payload, will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere.
With several companies planning to fill the sky with many communications satellites, there seems to be more than enough business for all the rocket companies, at least for a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced that it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches from three companies – Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace – to create more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.
Amazon later announced it was also buying three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.
Blue Origin isn’t just relying on business from Amazon. In November, it won an agreement from AST SpaceMobile for several New Glenn launches. AST is building a mobile broadband network that will work directly with smartphones.
The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another target for Blue Origin. If successful, this flight will count as the first of two flights required for the US Space Force to certify the rocket as ready for national security satellites.
The ESCAPADE mission, which coincided with the first New Glenn launch, could go into space on a subsequent New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.
Blue Origin is also targeting business beyond rockets.
The concept of space shuttles like the Blue Ring is not new, and there could be several uses for a spacecraft that could dock with another. A rocket launch can launch several satellites into a certain orbit, and a space shuttle can move them to different destinations. Space tugs can also repair or refuel old satellites or dispose of dead pieces of space debris by pushing them back into the atmosphere to burn up.
The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls a “wizard” for the future Blue Ring spacecraft. The prototype will remain attached to New Glenn’s second stage during the six-hour mission.
Several New Glenn launches will be used to put the Blue Moon spacecraft in position to carry astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA’s Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. If the incoming Trump administration renews Artemis program, Blue Origin’s role in it may increase or decrease.
Mr Bezos’ wealth in Amazon means Blue Origin does not need to be an immediate success and he is investing for the long term.
“I think it’s going to be the best business I’ve ever been involved in, but it’s going to take some time,” Mr. Bezos said during the DealBook Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do some pretty amazing things.”
