Update 1-16-25: The New Glenn rocket successfully launched around 1 a.m. CST. and made orbit. However, its booster, which was scheduled to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, was lost during reentry into the atmosphere.
Original Story:
After scrubbing twice this week, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, a 320-foot-tall reusable rocket, could finally lift from a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for its first flight test, ushering in the possibility that SpaceX could soon have some company in the commercial space flight industry.
That’s right, if things go according to plan when the three-hour launch window opens at midnight CST Wednesday Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos will finally have a reusable rocket that could – at some point, at least – give Elon Musk and the folks at SpaceX a run for their money.
But before all that the New Glenn has to jump through the crucial first hoop of lighting up all seven of its powerful engines and getting off the launchpad. The goal for this uncrewed flight is to reach orbit, which will require the spacecraft to achieve a speed of more than 17,000 mph, a first for the company.
Although Blue Origin has been around since 2000, the company’s previous feats have been decidedly more modest, with the smaller, fully reusable New Shepard rocket shooting space tourists up to the edge of space like a rollercoaster before the spacecraft comes back down to Earth.
But the Bezos-led company is more ambitious with the New Glenn (named after John Glenn, the first astronaut to orbit the planet) with which they hope to launch satellites both large satellites and spacecrafts. In the works since 2016, it was supposed to be ready for its first uncrewed test flight by 2020 but the project was delayed due to problems with the engines and other technical issues.
Test flights are just that, tests. Thus, the odds are high that this first launch won’t be smooth. But that hasn’t stopped the engineers at Blue Origin from shooting for the stars, so to speak. If they manage to get the rocket up without it, you know, blowing up the way test rockets occasionally have since back in the federal space program’s Mercury days, attention will then turn to the New Glenn’s reusable booster. Dubbed So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance for this flight, if things go incredibly well then the Blue Origin folks are hoping to see the booster land on a barge floating in the Atlantic.
If Blue Origin somehow pulls all of this off, both the rocket and the booster, the possibilities for the New Glenn will have their own rapid explosion, immediately giving NASA, other government agencies and businesses an alternative way to send satellites and spacecraft aloft, allowing the company the chance to become a serious contender against SpaceX.
That’s if it all goes swimmingly — or even reasonably — well.
If things don’t go so smoothly, Blue Origin may be delayed in hauling payloads for NASA and for Bezos’ own Amazon. Coming after the debacle of Boeing Starliner’s first crewed test flight last summer – the two astronauts who went up in Starliner for an eight-day sojourn in June are still aboard the International Space Station — there’s even more pressure on Blue Origin to get this uncrewed test flight right on the first try.
With such high stakes, it certainly seems like Blue Origin folks are hedging their bets and not taking any unnecessary risks. First slated to launch last Friday, the date was pushed to Monday because of bad weather, and Monday’s launch was scrubbed because of a technical issue with the vehicle’s subsystem (ice was forming on some key lines linked to the hydraulic systems).
But who knows, if the stars align and the weather cooperates, sometime between midnight and 3 a.m. Thursday we may get to find out if the New Glenn is a serious contender – or a very expensive firework.
