- Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, has launched its first orbital rocket, the New Glenn.
- The New Glenn is one of the largest and most powerful rockets ever built.
- The first launch marks a milestone for Blue Origin.
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has entered the rocketry big leagues.
At 2:03 a.m. ET on Thursday, Blue Origin’s 32-story-tall New Glenn rocket fired its seven engines and soared atop a cloud of fire and steam for the first time, roaring into the sky above launch complex at Cape Canaveral. Florida.
“LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first-ever ascent to the stars,” Blue Origin wrote in an X post Thursday morning.
Bezos, who was present at the New Glenn launch, uploaded a one-minute clip of the launch to X shortly after liftoff.
New Glenn belongs to a new generation of the biggest and most powerful rockets ever built, next to Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starship and NASA’s new moon rocket, the Space Launch System.
These heavy vehicles are roughly the size and weight of NASA’s Saturn V — the rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the Moon — but they’re designed for even more ambitious goals.
Musk and Bezos have backed plans to create permanent human settlements on Mars and a giant space station, respectively. NASA aims to build permanent science stations on and around the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars with the help of SpaceX and Blue Origins.
First, however, Blue Origin must strengthen its business. New Glenn’s The first launch positions the company to fly payloads into orbit and challenge SpaceX’s dominance.
Blue Origin was originally planning to launch New Glenn on Monday. The launch was repeatedly delayed and eventually postponed after Blue Origin said they had to “resolve a vehicle subsystem issue”.
We are moving our NG-1 launch no earlier than Thursday, January 16th. The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. EST (0600 UTC).
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) January 14, 2025
“I am extremely proud that New Glenn reached orbit on its first attempt,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said Thursday. “We knew our booster was down, so you’re telling me there’s a chance, on the first try it was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next presentation this spring. Thank you to the entire Blue team for this incredible milestone.”
Blue Origin loses booster on successful launch
In a statement two hours after launch, Blue Origin confirmed it had lost its booster after it separated from the rocket.
The booster was meant to return to Earth and land on a platform in the ocean, which would be the company’s first step in trying to reuse its booster.
This makes SpaceX the only company to have recovered and reused a rocket booster. The Musk-led rocket company has been taking its much smaller Falcon 9 first-stage boosters for reuse this way for years.
SpaceX’s Starship booster recently tried a different landing method, landing in the waiting arms of a landing tower in October.
Like Falcon 9, and unlike Starship, New Glenn is only partially reusable – its second stage is not designed for reuse.
Musk congratulated Bezos immediately after New Glenn’s successful liftoff.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first try! @JeffBezos,” Musk wrote on X.
Blue Origin’s future depends on New Glenn
After SpaceX, Blue Origin is one of the leading companies paving the way for reusable rockets, which could help lower the costs of spaceflight.
Weeks before New Glenn’s debut, during the 2024 New York Times DealBook Summit, Bezos said Blue Origin is “not a very good business yet.”
He added: “It’s going to be the best business I’ve ever been involved in.”
New Glenn is Blue Origin’s second rocket, but the first designed to put itself into Earth orbit.
The company began construction on New Glenn in 2016. Bezos has said that he is not satisfied with the speed of the company’s progress.
“Blue Origin should be much faster,” Bezos told Lex Friedman in December 2023. “And it’s one of the reasons I stepped down from my role as CEO of Amazon a few years ago.”
By comparison, SpaceX began developing its first orbital rocket, the Falcon 9 v1.0, in 2005. It made its debut five years later, in 2010.
That said, New Glenn is more than three times more powerful than SpaceX’s first Falcon 9.
Blue Origin’s relatively small New Shepard rocket, which carries payloads and other cargo into suborbital space, has been reused nearly 30 times since its first launch in 2015.
Marianne Ayala/Insider
New Glenn’s maiden voyage is carrying a test payload
As Blue Origin’s barge sails the booster back to shore, the rocket’s second stage is scheduled to stay in space for about six hours while carrying the company’s prototype Blue Ring spacecraft.
The blue ring is designed for multiple types of missions, including transportation, refueling and communication with other ships in space. The prototype pod launched on Thursday is a test launch and is set to stay on board and not be deployed in space.
“There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits,” Limp wrote in X in December. Blue Ring is designed to meet this need for government and commercial customers, said Blue Origin’s CEO.
The Federal Aviation Administration has granted Blue Origin a license to launch New Glenn into orbit from Cape Canaveral for the next five years.
Blue Origin’s customers include NASA, Amazon and several telecommunications providers.
