“Bezos’ Blue Origin postpones first launch of New Glenn rocket poised to challenge Musk’s SpaceX Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has delayed the debut orbital launch of its new 98-meter New Glenn rocket due to technical issues. The launch was planned to take place from Cape Canaveral, but after several delays, the mission was canceled.”, — write on: unn.ua
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The tallest, 98-meter rocket, named New Glenn after the legendary astronaut John Glenn, was to launch from the space station at Cape Canaveral in a three-hour window starting at 1:00 a.m. (06:00 GMT).
But the countdown was repeatedly halted as teams scrambled to fix “anomalies” before the mission was officially “cancelled” around 3:10 a.m. – a common occurrence in the space industry, but frustrating for the hundreds of thousands of people who stayed awake to watch the live broadcast.
“We are canceling today’s launch attempt to address spacecraft subsystem issues that will take us beyond our launch window,” Blue Origin chief Ariane Cornell said in a webcast.
She added: “We are looking at options for our next launch attempt.”
“With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only person in the world richer than him: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market with its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, vital to the commercial sector, the Pentagon and NASA,” the publication says.
Bezos, who founded Blue Origin a quarter of a century ago and celebrated his 61st birthday on Sunday, watched the events unfold from a nearby launch control room.
Musk, for his part, wished Blue Origin “good luck!” on X.
“SpaceX has been pretty much the only player for the last few years, so having a competitor … it’s great,” Scott Gabbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship – its giant next-generation rocket – this week, raising the stakes in the rivalry.
When New Glenn does fly, Blue Origin will try to land the first stage on an unmanned craft called Jacklyn, named after Bezos’ mother, about 1,000 kilometers away in the Atlantic Ocean.
While SpaceX has long made such landings a near-common sight, this will be Blue Origin’s first attempt at an open-sea landing.
Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will launch its engines toward Earth orbit.
A prototype of an advanced spacecraft called Blue Ring, funded by the US Department of Defense, that could one day travel to the solar system, will remain for a test flight of about six hours.
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Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets, which are used for suborbital tourism, but they are five times smaller and land on solid ground rather than on a ship at sea.
The shiny white New Glenn outclasses the Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads. It sits between the Falcon 9 and its bigger “brother” Falcon Heavy in terms of payload, but has an advantage thanks to a wider payload fairing capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks, the publication writes.
Blue Origin has already received a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, an internet satellite group designed to compete with Starlink.
However, for now, SpaceX maintains the lead, while other competitors – United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab – are far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has been fascinated by space all his life.
But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions transferring heavy industry from the planet to floating space platforms to preserve Earth, “the blue beginning of humanity.”
He founded Blue Origin in 2000 – two years before Musk created SpaceX – but took a more cautious pace, in contrast to his competitor’s “fail fast, learn fast” philosophy.
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