After years of delays, the launch of Blue Origin‘s long-awaited New Glenn rocket is scheduled for this week, ushering in a new era of competition between the two rocket billionaires.
The New Glenn is scheduled to launch no earlier than Friday, January 10, during a three-hour launch window that opens at 1 a.m. EST, Blue Origin said Monday. The rocket will lift off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder vehicle, which will make its first test flight. The first launch of New Glenn will also be the rocket’s certification flight, paving the way for its use in future missions to carry national security payloads.
“This is our first flight, and we’ve prepared for it thoroughly,” said Jarrett Jones, senior vice president of New Glenn, in a statement. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations can replace flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we will learn, improve and apply this knowledge to our next launch.”
Blue Origin, founded by the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, has been developing the $2.5 billion New Glenn rocket for almost a decade. The rocket’s debut launch, originally scheduled for 2020, has experienced several delays, however, mostly related to the development of its engines. The New Glenn uses seven BE-4 engines developed by Blue Origin, which required extensive testing and refinement.
With the upcoming debut of the New Glenn, Blue Origin can officially compete with industry favorite SpaceX, further fueling the rivalry between Bezos and his billionaire nemesis Elon Musk. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is a reusable suborbital rocket primarily used to launch space tourists on short trips above the Karman Line (the demarcation of space), and did so for the first time in July 2021. The New Glenn, on the other hand, is a partially reusable heavy-lift rocket capable of lifting 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit and 13 metric tons into geostationary transfer orbit. The 313-foot (95-meter) tall rocket has a reusable first stage powered by seven BE-4 methane-fueled engines. By comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of placing 63 metric tons into low Earth orbit and 26 metric tons into geostationary orbit.
New Glenn’s first payload, Blue Ring, is a spacecraft platform designed to provide “integrated services that span hosting, transportation, refueling, data and logistics, including cloud computing capabilities in space,” according to Blue Origin. It has been aptly described as “a space truck that will eventually serve both commercial and government customers and will be able to carry payloads of up to 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms).
The rocket was originally scheduled to launch in November 2024 to deliver a pair of NASA probes to Mars as part of its maiden flight. The space agency halted preparations for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers missions in September due to concerns that New Glenn would not be ready in time. Instead, Blue Origin agreed to postpone the second flight of New Glenn to meet the launch window for the Mars mission later this year.
Last year, Bezos’s space company finally got its act together and began preparations for New Glenn’s debut. The company replaced Bob Smith as CEO, hiring former Amazon executive David Limp in his place. Blue Origin also announced that it plans to land on the moon without a crew in 2025 using a prototype of its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo ship, potentially beating SpaceX to the lunar surface – with the emphasis on “potentially.”
