- Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin scored a big win Thursday with its first New Glenn launch.
- The heavy-duty vehicle is poised to open up a whole new business for Bezos’ company.
- Meanwhile, SpaceX is paving the way for complete reusability with its revolutionary Starship rocket.
Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company, Blue Origin, took a big step forward Thursday when it successfully launched its unmanned New Glenn rocket into space on its first test.
It’s a pivotal moment for Blue Origin. The New Glenn – named after the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn – is the company’s first and only orbital rocket.
It’s poised to open up a new business for Blue Origin and accelerate the company’s efforts to overtake SpaceX as a dominant force in spaceflight.
There’s plenty of work to be done, though SpaceX hit a setback on the same day as New Glenn’s launch when its Starship exploded during its seventh spaceflight.
“Comparing them directly to SpaceX right now is premature, as they have years to catch up,” Abhi Tripathi, a former SpaceX mission director who now heads mission operations at UC Berkeley, told Business Insider in an email. Space Sciences Lab. .
“Achieving orbit on the first attempt of a new rocket is commendable,” he added. “Now the real work can begin: demonstrating the reliability and repeatability of your rocket.”
New Glenn can’t match Starship, and it’s not meant to
Blue Origin’s latest New Glenn rocket screams into space in the early morning hours. Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images
New Glenn is a big step for Blue Origin, but not as revolutionary in the launch industry as Starship, SpaceX’s most ambitious project.
Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut who consulted for SpaceX’s Safety Advisory Panel for 12 years, called Starship “the most exciting thing” since the Apollo era.
“It’s going to be really disruptive” because of its size, power and sheer reusability, he told Business Insider in December.
While New Glenn is designed to reuse its booster — much like SpaceX’s Falcon rockets — Starship is set to be completely and rapidly reusable. Both its upper and lower stages are intended to return to Earth, be quickly renewed, and fly again repeatedly. This could reduce the cost of spaceflight tenfold.
The latest explosion could ground Starship for some time if the Federal Aviation Administration launches an investigation. However, SpaceX has already proven that Starship can land upright from suborbital flights and has lowered the rocket booster twice in one piece.
New Glenn is not intended to be a competitor to Starship anyway, Tripathi said.
New Glenn has a payload capacity between that of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which is “a nice place to be,” Chiao told BI in an email.
It fills a slightly different niche in launch services, with a wider footprint than the Falcon Heavy. This could allow customers more flexibility in how they package their satellites or spacecraft for launch.
In that range of rockets, it’s “good to have some competition,” Chiao added.
SpaceX and Blue Origin did not respond to requests for comment.
Blue Origin is an orbital newcomer. SpaceX is a giant.
SpaceX and Blue Origin are also in different business positions.
As the company’s first orbital rocket, New Glenn opens up new revenue streams for Blue Origin. It already has dozens of missions on the books worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters. That includes launches to build Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network, a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink with far fewer satellites in operation.
SpaceX has been cashing in on Falcon 9 orbital launches for more than a decade. It has been using the rocket to fly both astronauts and tourists into orbit regularly since 2020.
Falcon rockets drove a surge in global launches last year, accounting for 134 of a record 259 orbital launch attempts worldwide, according to a SpaceNews analysis. SpaceX launched more orbital rockets than the rest of the world combined.
By comparison, Blue Origin had not launched a single rocket into orbit until now. Instead, the company’s launch business has been roughly 10-minute sightseeing trips to the edges of space like the one Bezos brought William Shatner to in 2021.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has flown three private missions into orbit led by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is now President-elect Trump’s nominee for NASA Administrator.
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.”
Still, he added, “it’s going to be the best business I’ve ever been involved in.”
However, it will take more than New Glenn to reach SpaceX levels of launch capability.
