They’ve pulled it off. At 1:03 a.m. CST Thursday flames plumed out from the base of Blue Origin’s 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket and the vessel lifted off the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the coast of Florida, jetting through the atmosphere and into orbit in a smooth arc while the engineers at the Jeff Bezos-founded rocket company whooped and hollered.
With this launch, Blue Origin has gone from being a suborbital space tourist entity to having potential to become a true contender with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the company that is currently the only game in town (i.e. in the United States) in the launch business — other than NASA itself.
Although the launch failed to achieve its secondary goal of vertically landing the reusable booster (dubbed So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance because it was such a longshot) on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean, that was always going to be a bonus for the company, as representatives noted in the lead up to the launch. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp wasn’t sweating the loss of the booster.
“I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” Limp stated. “We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring.”
Meanwhile the New Glenn’s triumphant entry into orbit was followed by an uneventful six-hour mission that took the company’s Blue Ring, a platform designed to back up and relocate satellites, to medium-Earth orbit.
This is a momentous step forward for the Bezos’ company, of course, but this is also huge for NASA and any other government entities and commercial companies that want to send stuff into space. Coming on the heels of Boeing Starliner’s embarrassing crewed test flight last summer, which underscored that SpaceX is still top dog when it comes to hauling astronauts to and from the ISS, it’s clear that this could soon not be the case.
In fact, if all goes well from here, the New Glenn will become a true competitor with SpaceX, boasting the ability to haul an amount to space that will fall right between that of the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy.
This is rocket science, so of course there’s always plenty that can go wrong, but for now the folks over at Blue Origin are most likely having a pretty fine day indeed.
