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UPDATE: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is postponing the anticipated debut of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket due to turbulent seas in the Atlantic, which means we’ll have to wait at least another day for the company’s inaugural orbital launch.
Blue Origin was gearing up for the milestone launch from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 1 a.m. ET on Sunday (10 p.m. PT tonight), but determined that the weather conditions weren’t favorable for an attempt to land New Glenn’s first-stage booster on a barge positioned hundreds of miles offshore.
A similar scenario led to a delay a few days ago. “Sea state conditions are still unfavorable for booster landing,” Blue Origin reported in this afternoon’s update.
The next three-hour launch window is set to begin at 1 a.m. ET Monday (10 p.m. PT Sunday). Blue Origin intends to stream coverage of the countdown beginning about an hour before liftoff.
While Blue Origin has been launching smaller New Shepard rockets on suborbital spaceflights for a decade, it has yet to send a payload into Earth orbit. That’s set to change with the liftoff from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
This will be the first launch in 20 years to occur at Launch Complex 36, which previously hosted Atlas rocket launches and has been leased by Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin since 2015.
New Glenn’s development dates back to 2012. Three years into the design and development phase, Bezos made headlines when he announced that the orbital-class rocket, named after pioneering NASA astronaut John Glenn, would be manufactured at a 750,000-square-foot Florida facility and launched from Cape Canaveral.
The rocket stands more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall and boasts a 7-meter (23-foot-wide) payload fairing, which Blue Origin claims can offer twice the volume of a standard 5-meter fairing. An entire New Shepard rocket could fit within the fairing, with excess space on the sides.
New Glenn’s first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, fueled with liquefied natural gas. The second stage utilizes two hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines. Maximum thrust at liftoff is 3.8 million pounds, roughly half the thrust produced by the Saturn V moon rockets of the Apollo era. The rocket should be capable of delivering up to 99,000 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit, which is 50 percent more than NASA’s space shuttle could accommodate.
The journey to space hasn’t been entirely smooth. For example, Blue Origin had to overcome challenges encountered during the development of New Glenn’s BE-4 rocket engines.
Company executives admit that success isn’t assured. “This is our first flight and we’ve prepared thoroughly for it,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn, said last week. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations can substitute for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”
The primary goal of this mission, known as NG-1, is to safely reach orbit with Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, a technology demonstration payload designed to test the telemetry, communications, and control systems for the company’s Blue Ring multi-mission space mobility platform. The test mission is part of the Defense Innovation Unit’s initiative to enhance in-space mobility for the Pentagon. NG-1 will also serve as Blue Origin’s first certification flight for the Pentagon’s National Security Space Launch program.
New Glenn’s second stage is expected to send the payload into a highly elliptical orbit ranging from 1,490 to 12,000 miles (2,400 to 19,300 kilometers) in altitude. This orbit is likely intended to test the in-space system’s capabilities and the ground-based infrastructure at those orbital heights.
The first-stage booster is engineered to fly itself to an at-sea landing on a custom-built barge named Jacklyn in honor of Jeff Bezos’ mother. However, sea conditions must be calm enough to permit a landing, and thus far, the conditions have been deemed too rough to proceed. The weather forecast appears “much more favorable for this new window,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp stated today in a post on the X social media platform.
In an earlier post, Limp stressed that the test mission’s success doesn’t hinge on whether the booster achieves a successful landing. “Our objective is to reach orbit. Anything beyond that is a bonus,” he remarked. “Landing our booster offshore is ambitious — but we’re going for it. No matter what, we will learn a great deal.”
If New Glenn succeeds, it would mean increased competition for SpaceX, which currently dominates the launch industry. Blue Origin claims to have several New Glenn vehicles in production at its Florida factory, and has secured a “full customer manifest” for launches in the coming months.
Notable missions include satellite launches to low Earth orbit for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and for AST SpaceMobile’s space-based cellular network. Looking further ahead, New Glenn is scheduled to send twin orbiters to Mars for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission.
