On Thursday morning, at a time when most people in the United States were sleeping, Jeff Bezos’ space company sent its first rocket into orbit.
At 2:03 a.m. ET, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. Flames lit up day and night at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, pushed up and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, glowing blue, the color of burning the rocket’s methane fuel.
Thirteen minutes later, New Glenn’s second stage reached orbit.
The launch was a huge success for Blue Origin, Mr Bezos’ rocket company. It should appease critics who say the company has been too slow compared to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has dominated the global spaceflight industry in recent years. New Glenn could be a credible competitor to Mr. Musk’s company and win launch contracts from NASA and the Defense Department, as well as commercial contracts.
Still, for a moment at least, the world’s two richest men warmly cheered each other on.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Mr Musk wrote on X, the social media site he owns.
“Thank you!” Mr. Bezos responded.
Mr. Bezos has posted a number of photos and videos. “Beautiful,” Mr. Musk commented on one of the images.
The ascent seemed nearly perfect, but Blue Origin’s stretch goal of landing the booster stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean failed. As planned, the booster fired three of its engines to slow down, but then the data stream stopped, indicating that the booster had been lost.
“We will learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring,” Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s chief executive, said in a statement.
For years, Mr. Bezos has talked about an ambitious vision of millions of people working and living in space, sending spacecraft to the moon and building space stations. Skeptics, however, pointed out that Blue Origin hadn’t sent a single thing into orbit since the company was founded nearly a quarter century ago, two years before SpaceX.
Now there is.
“There was reason to doubt before this launch whether Blue Origin actually had the technical capability,” said Todd Harrison, a space policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. “And now they’ve proven they do.”
Until now, Blue Origin had only launched its smaller New Shepard rocket, which sent space tourists and science experiments on suborbital walks to the edge of space, providing a few minutes of cruising. Mr. Bezos was among the first passengers on a New Shepard flight in 2021.
New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the first American to orbit Earth, dwarfs New Shepard. Indeed, a New Shepard could fit inside the New Glenn’s payload bay in the nose cone. Achieving speed to circle the Earth is a far more complex task than the New Shepard vehicle has achieved.
“All of a sudden, you’ve graduated to a new level of credibility,” said Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at BryceTech, a consulting firm in Alexandria, Va.
When Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, he said it would be ready by the end of 2020. A large Blue Origin rocket plant rose just outside NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but there were few signs of its own. the rocket. The original target date came and went.
Blue Origin was selected to launch a NASA mission – ESCAPADE, which will take measurements of the Martian atmosphere – in October last year. But NASA pulled the spacecraft from the inaugural flight when it became uncertain that Blue Origin could be ready in time.
Instead, this launch had to orbit a prototype Blue Ring, a vehicle that could move satellites into Earth orbit. For this flight, the prototype — Blue Origin calls it a “guide” — remained attached to the rocket’s second stage while testing the communications, power and flight computer systems.
Blue Origin says that in the future Blue Ring will be able to move payloads between many different orbits, including ones that go all the way to the Moon and perform a variety of tasks.
The Blue Ring prototype performed as expected during the six-hour mission, Blue Origin said.
Blue Origin still lags far behind SpaceX in achievements – Mr Musk’s company launched more than 100 times last year. But New Glenn could provide long-awaited competition to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which currently dominate the launch industry.
“The only question that remains, I think, is how quickly they can increase the release rate,” Mr Harrison said.
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Limp said that, with a successful inaugural launch of New Glenn, Blue Origin is aiming for a second launch in the spring and that he wanted six to eight launches this year.
“This would be a good year for us, I think,” he said.
“Jeff would like us to do more, so we’re pushing,” added Mr. Limp, referring to Mr. Bezos, who was sitting next to him.
“This is very realistic,” Mr. Bezos said.
One of Blue Origin’s contracts is with Mr. Bezos’s other company, Amazon, to launch satellites for Project Kuiper, a constellation of Internet satellites. It will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink system.
Blue Origin officials have not yet announced what will be going up this year, but launches could include an unmanned lunar lander. Blue Origin is working on a spacecraft that will take NASA astronauts to the surface of the Moon in a few years.
During an interview last year on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” a Blue Origin official revealed that the company was developing a small lunar lander it called Blue Moon Mark 1, scheduled to launch to the Moon in 2025.
Mr Limp said this was still the plan and the spacecraft is currently under construction.
A full-scale model of the Mark 1 lander dominates the lobby of the Blue Origin building in Florida.
“It’s supposed to go this year,” Mr. Bezos said. “I think it will go this year.”
