Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin blasts into orbit with New Glenn launch

Jeff Bezos blasted his way into the orbital space launch industry on Thursday as his New Glenn rocket successfully made its first test flight in a thunderous, blazing spectacle.

Igniting its seven liquid oxygen and methane-fuelled engines, the 30-storey vehicle rose off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2.03am Eastern Time with 3.8 million pounds (1,720 metric tonnes) of thrust, painting a blue streak across the sky.

“Godspeed, New Glenn,” yelled spectators who huddled on the beaches in the chilly morning air to witness a new milestone in space history. 

The rocket was named in honour of the late John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962 during the space race with the Soviet Union.

It will compete in a market already dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, delivering cargo, satellites and ultimately humans to space. SpaceX, which operates the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, is aiming to carry out the seventh flight test of its next generation vehicle, Starship, from Texas later on Thursday.

 

“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt @jeffbezos,” Musk posted on X.

Hopes of bringing New Glenn’s reusable booster segment back to Earth and landing it on a drone ship 1,000km (620 miles) from the launchpad — a feat only previously accomplished by SpaceX for an orbital class vehicle — were dashed, however.

Bezos had named the booster “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance?” — a line taken from the 1994 movie Dumb and Dumber. It turned out there wasn’t. “We lost the booster,” announced Ariane Cornell, a vice-president of Blue Origin, after telemetry from the vehicle was lost and it failed to land on the droneship, named Jacklyn after Bezos’s mother.

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The company had played down expectations before the launch. “Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious,” Cornell had cautioned.

The second stage of the rocket continued successfully to orbit, delivering its payload — the Blue Ring Pathfinder, a prototype spacecraft to validate flight systems, tracking, communications and power systems for future flights — to medium Earth orbit.

Blue Origin later said that the second stage engine of its massive New Glenn rocket had reached “its final orbit” after its maiden orbital launch.

“The second stage is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines,” Blue Origin said in a statement, adding that the Blue Ring advanced spaceship prototype was “receiving data and performing well” but the booster was lost during descent.

Future payloads for New Glenn will include satellites — such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet constellation — components for building a next-generation space habitat, and space systems for the Department of Defence.

Nasa has also contracted Blue Origin to build a lunar lander, Blue Moon, as part of its Artemis programme to take astronauts back to the moon for the first time ince 1972 and establish a sustainable presence.

Meanwhile Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket delivers paying passengers to the doorstep of space — taking them on brief suborbital rides to just over 100km (62 miles) altitude over Texas.

Bill Nelson, the head of Nasa, said: “Congratulations to Blue Origin on the first successful test flight of New Glenn. Together, and in the spirit of John Glenn, we are pushing the boundaries of exploration and reaching new heights — to the moon, Mars and beyond.”

 

 

 

 

For Bezos, it was the culmination of a dream he hatched as a teenager, when he founded a space club at school in Miami and set out his vision to become a space entrepreneur.

Blue Origin said: “A reusable rocket purpose-built to deliver high volume and mass to orbit, New Glenn is a key to unlocking our long-term vision — a future where people and heavy industries are moved into space to preserve Earth, humanity’s blue origin.”

Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket flew for the first time in 2015. In 2016, Bezos sought John Glenn’s blessing to name his next generation rocket in his honour.

Glenn — who also served for two decades as a US senator and flew on the space shuttle in 1998 aged 77 — consented in a letter to Bezos, written ten days before he died.

“When I first orbited the earth, in 1962, you were still two years from being born. And when I returned to space, in 1998, Blue Origin was still two years in the future. But you were already driven by a vision of space travel accessible not only to highly trained pilots and engineers and scientists, but to all of us. And you understood that to realise that vision, we would have to be able to get to space more often and more inexpensively,” he wrote.

“So you and your Blue Origin team began designing rockets that can be reused over and over again. I’m deeply touched that you’ve named the second generation of those rockets … the New Glenn. As the original Glenn, I can tell you I see the day coming when people will board spacecraft the same way millions of us now board jetliners. When that happens it will be largely because of your epic achievements.”