Florida:
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is poised for the inaugural launch of its massive New Glenn rocket on Sunday, a long-awaited first leap to orbit that poses one of the biggest challenges yet to SpaceX's industry dominance of Elon Musk.
At 30 stories tall, New Glenn has been a major focus for Blue Origin since the beginning of its decade-long development. It represents a multibillion-dollar effort to meet demand for satellite constellation launches and take market share from SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9.
If New Glenn is successful in its debut, it could later begin launching Amazon's broadband internet satellite constellation, Kuiper, which will rival SpaceX's Starlink network, increasing competition on another front.
For years, Blue Origin has launched and landed its much smaller, reusable New Shepard rocket to and from the edge of Earth's atmosphere. Nothing has been put into orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company to enable “millions of people to work and live in space.”
That could change this week, but success isn't guaranteed with new rockets.
New Glenn is scheduled to launch Sunday at 1 a.m. ET (0600 GMT) from the company's launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending its first Blue Ring satellite into orbit – a maneuverable spacecraft designed for satellite maintenance and national security missions in space.
Compared to SpaceX's Falcon 9, the world's most active rocket, the New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful, with a payload bay twice the size of the space for larger batches of satellites. Blue Origin did not reveal the rocket's launch price. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.
However, the new Glenn wouldn't be as powerful as SpaceX's next-generation Starship, a fully reusable rocket system in development that Musk sees as crucial to expanding Starlink's on-orbit footprint. Starship will attempt to deploy fake satellites on its next test flight this month.
'FOUND A SWEET PLACE'
There are dozens of launches and hundreds of millions of dollars on New Glenn's docket. Blue Origin has signed multi-launch agreements with Eutelsat's OneWeb, Canada's Telesat and satellite-to-cellular device company AST SpaceMobile.
“New Glenn has found a sweet spot that has allowed them to acquire more customers than anyone else right now,” said Caleb Henry, satellite and launch analyst at Quilty Analytics, about the space company's potential in satellite constellations.
SpaceX's Falcon 9, which sparked the industry's reusability trend for its cost-saving potential, made early landing attempts on the rocket's core by returning it to the ocean during development a decade ago, before attempting landings on drone ships.
New Glenn's reusable core stage will make its first landing attempt on a drone ship a few minutes after launch.
New Glenn's shaky development spanned three CEOs and slowed at times as Blue Origin took on other ambitious projects, such as building a lunar lander for NASA.
As much of the Western world became dependent on SpaceX for access to space, Bezos attempted to pull New Glenn out of development paralysis in late 2023 by replacing Blue Origin CEO with Dave Limp, a deputy from Amazon's devices division, to to speed things up.
Blue Origin's engineers have sensed the urgency from the top down, according to several employees.
“We've never had the entire company focused so aggressively on one thing,” said one Blue Origin employee. “For the past year, it's been everyone's mission basically every day to achieve this first launch.”
New Glenn would also compete with the less powerful Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed that plans a more powerful Vulcan variant in the future.
Sunday's launch is also a key certification flight that the US Space Force needs before New Glenn can launch national security payloads for missions it hopes to win in a multibillion-dollar procurement competition to be awarded later this year.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)