Nearly 10 years after it first sent a rocket into space, Blue Origin put one into Earth orbit when it launched its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral at 2:03 a.m. ET Thursday.
The 322-foot-long, two-stage launch vehicle slowly eased off the pad at Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and then accelerated steadily upward, its seven BE-4 fueled engines leaving a blue trail of bright and purple. the fire.
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About three minutes later, the booster’s single job is done, followed by stage separation, and the second stage takes its payload — a guided version of the Jeff Bezos-owned company’s Blue Ring satellite servicing spacecraft — to orbit.
Thirteen minutes after liftoff, the two BE-3U hydrogen-fueled second stage engines had completed their work.
This is 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. It took SpaceX four tries with its Falcon 1 rocket, Rocket Lab needed two for its Electron, and other smaller American space startups have seen their would-be debuts end in 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 — the landing on a barge named the Jacklyn after Bezos’ mother — didn’t go so well. Telemetry from the booster froze after it began the reentry burn, with the latest figures putting it at 4,285 mph and an altitude of 84,226 feet.
The night launch of New Glenn apparently made for impressive viewing. (Credit: Gregg Newton/Getty Images)
Launch commentator Ariane Cornell, vice president of Blue Origin’s space systems business unit, confirmed the loss of the booster in a live broadcast after the second stage aborted. The company’s announcement of the launch quoted CEO Dave Limp as saying “We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring.”
Landing the booster on the first try would have been even less likely than reaching orbit without a practice run. It took three attempts for SpaceX to land a Falcon 9 booster after four years of successful launches, though it has since made power kicks a routine end to hundreds of launches.
Blue Origin has assembled its own practical landing rockets with the single-stage, suborbital New Shepard rocket, which was its only vehicle to reach space until Thursday, and which carried Bezos into space on debut its manned in July 2021. But New Glenn is much bigger 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 cargo into low Earth orbit and place more than 14 tons into geostationary orbit. That puts it in competition with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, but not that company’s much larger, still-in-development Starship, which will have its seventh test launch Thursday afternoon.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tipped his hat to X Bezos, posting: “Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first try!” Then Musk went back to fueling conspiracy theories about OpenAI and the Los Angeles fires.
New Glenn’s liftoff was originally scheduled for Friday after a long development delay, then was delayed by unfriendly weather, then canceled early Monday morning after frost developed on a sweep line. Thursday’s departure was then delayed by about half an hour when a boat drifted into the offshore departure area designed for the safety of sailors.
Blue Origin can’t be the only organization where people feel relieved to see this rocket fly: Other firms as well as government agencies have many opportunities to use the potential of New Glenn.
Amazon’s Kuiper Project booked 12 flights of New Glenn 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 broadband BlueBird satellites. And the lunar lander that NASA ordered from Blue Origin as an alternative to a version of SpaceX’s Starship will fly to New Glenn.
Those ambitions seem more real after Thursday’s debut.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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