He has finally achieved it. 25 years have passed since technology magnate Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin and this space company is known only for its very expensive suborbital flights for millionaires, to whom he looks into space for a few moments and gives them . That reputation has begun to change today, with the debut of its first rocket to seriously compete in the space race. It is the New Glenn: a heavy space shuttle, intended to compete with Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 by carrying satellites and probes into space; and that even aspires to surpass them, since it is designed to
The NG-1 countdown clock is proceeding. The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. EST (0600 UTC).
Live webcast begins here 20 minutes before launch.
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin)
The rocket took off early this Thursday – at 8:03 a.m. Spanish peninsular time – from the US Space Force Center in Cape Canaveral (Florida). The successful takeoff comes after technical reasons that Blue Origin has not specified, and after two previous postponements last week, due to adverse weather conditions.
At NASA, which needs the New Glenn that should have left in October 2024, this test flight was eagerly awaited, with a maximum duration of six hours, and which took off with the main objective of placing a capsule in orbit and take it almost 20,000 kilometers away from Earth.
Before that, the first challenge of the NG-1the inaugural mission of the New Glenn — a 98-meter-high colossus named after that — arrived eight minutes after launch, when Blue Origin failed to land the main booster on the Atlantic Ocean, which after boosting takeoff and the toughest stretch of the ascension, had detached itself from the top of the rocket two minutes into the flight. “We have lost the propellant,” the company acknowledged during the live broadcast of the launch.
That soft landing on a so-called barge was not crucial to the success of Thursday’s test. But successfully completing the maneuver is essential to achieve partial reuse of the rocket, turning it into a profitable machine for lifting cargo into space. This had previously been achieved by Blue Origin, which it uses for its space tourism flights. Reusing the main thrusters has also been SpaceX’s strategy, with which it has managed to reduce the cost of space flights and be able to carry out launches every few days, aimed primarily at deploying satellites.
The test of these capabilities of the New Glenn as a space carrier occurred after the separation of the main booster. The rocket’s upper stage, which is expendable, has continued to propel a cargo capsule — the Blue Ring Pathfinder— to place it in one with a minimum height of 2,400 kilometers above the surface of the Earth and a maximum of 19,300 kilometers. On the inaugural flight, the upper booster accompanied the capsule at all times, but on normal flights—once the shuttle is operational—it will detach upon reaching orbit and fall into the sea: it is the disposable part of the rocket.
In that climactic premiere phase of the New Glenn, a demonstration of maneuvers was planned that in the future will allow it to place space devices in orbit, such as the military satellites of the US Department of Defense, which partially finances this initiative of Jeff Bezos’ company. The technology magnate also plans to use its New Glenn rockets to deploy telecommunications, with which Amazon intends to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, offering global broadband internet access.
Alternative to Musk’s dominance
If Blue Origin’s star rocket also passes another additional test mission, it will obtain the operating license and will address those first objectives of deploying military and telecommunications satellites in the coming years. Only then, once consolidated as a viable and reusable space shuttle – the plan is to use each main booster to carry out up to 25 launches – would the New Glenn aspire to be an alternative to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, both SpaceX models, that have been flying for more than a decade and practically monopolize the space launch market. The Falcon are the most used commercial rockets in history; and overall, they are only surpassed by the veteran Soyuz of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, since its premiere in 1966.
With these ambitious aspirations, launching the New Glenn has already represented a complex qualitative leap for the space company Blue Origin, which had initially planned this launch in 2020. Until now it only had one other rocket, the New Shepard —named in memory of Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to travel to space—with much lower capabilities. It only allowed suborbital flights, intended for fleeting experiences of space tourism and also brief scientific experiments. Bezos’s new rocket is five times taller and is also designed to raise space artifacts to all types of Earth orbits: from low to geostationary.
The success of the New Glenn will mean that NASA will finally have one more private alternative, in addition to Elon Musk’s Falcon, to deploy its space probes and telescopes. And, if it demonstrates sufficient reliability, to take astronauts to the Moon planned for the 2030s.
