The fundamental pillar of Jeff Bezos' space dreams is finally ready for launch.
A New Glenn rocket, built by Blue Origin, the rocket company Bezos founded nearly a quarter-century ago, sits on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building and its bulky nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the pre-dawn darkness of Sunday, it may be heading into space for the first time.
“This has been expected for a long time,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company, Elon Musk's SpaceX, is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX innovations that have greatly reduced the cost of sending things to space, they are wary of trusting a company that is subject to the whims of the world's richest person.
“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger, heavier payloads, Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX's current rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as large as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system SpaceX is currently developing.
Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon and a space tug called Blue Ring, a vehicle that could move satellites into Earth's orbit.
Bezos' other company, online retail giant amazon, also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of Internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network.
Bezos, the second richest person in the world after Musk, also talks grandiosely of a future in which millions of people live and work in space, of immense cylindrical habitats that rotate to provide artificial gravity and of moving polluting industries into space. . someday to allow the Earth to return to a more pristine state.
“I know it sounds fantastic,” Bezos said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December, “so I ask the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it's not fantastic.”
But those plans and hopes can't take off without a rocket. “That's what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about,” Bezos said.
The 21st century space age is often described as a race of billionaires rather than nations, but so far it hasn't been a race at all. SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put anything into orbit.
“I think a lot of people forget that Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Harrison said.
Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, that goes up and down. It passes the 62-mile altitude considered the edge of space, but never comes close to reaching the speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour needed to enter orbit around the planet. New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Bezos himself, and for scientific experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses Blue Origin engines as the propellant for its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.
In 2015, with fanfare and publicity, Bezos announced plans for the then-unnamed rocket.
Bezos said it would be manufactured in a factory that Blue Origin would build in Florida, near NASA's Kennedy Space Center. He promised it would be released by the end of the decade.
The factory appeared—giant, square buildings colored the company's signature bright blue hue—but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach Earth's orbit, did not appear.
Blue Origin continued to push back the rocket's debut date.
During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, a senior vice president at Blue Origin who is overseeing the development of New Glenn, said he expected “multiple” New Glenn launches in 2024. While taking a tour of Blue Origin's factory in February of 2024, He said he expected two launches by the end of the year.
The delays continued. The first flight of New Glenn, which was to carry two identical spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission to measure the atmosphere of Mars, was scheduled to take off in October.
But in September, NASA, doubting that New Glenn would be ready on time, announced that it had removed ESCAPADE from that inaugural launch.
Blue Origin said a prototype of Blue Ring, the space tug, would fly instead. In early December, the completed rocket arrived at the launch pad.
Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to grant a license for the launch. That finally came on December 27th.
Later that day, Blue Origin conducted a launch rehearsal, with the countdown clock reaching zero and the rocket engines igniting and unleashing torrents of flame and smoke. But, as planned, the rocket remained firmly attached, and after 24 seconds, the engines shut down – a final test to detect and fix failures.
As soon as 1 a.m. ET on January 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down its engines, New Glenn will rise into space. The midnight launch window, which extends until 4 a.m., is the result of air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for a large, untested rocket.
The hope is that New Glenn's debut is better late than never.
Last year, Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could accelerate its pace to one launch per month in 2025 and eventually double that number or more.
No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has been able to accelerate the launch of a new vehicle so quickly.
“That's pretty substantial,” said Carissa Christensen, CEO of BryceTech, a space consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. But if Blue Origin can't keep up with the promised pace, its customers could also fall behind.
Like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, New Glenn is intended to be partially reusable, and the booster is designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform called Jacklyn, after Bezos' mother.
For the first flight, the booster was nicknamed “So you're telling me there's a chance.”
<a target="_blank" class="css-yywogo" href="https://x.com/davill/status/1834703746842214468″ title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>On the social networking siteDave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, explained: “Why? No one has ever gotten a reusable booster on the first try. However, we are going for it and we humbly present ourselves with confidence in achieving it. But like I said a couple of weeks ago, if we don't do it, we'll learn and we'll keep trying until we get it.”
Harrison said the reusable boosters, designed to be launched at least 25 times, would help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. Currently, United Launch Alliance's Vulcan and Arianespace's Ariane 6 rocket fly only once and fall into the ocean.
The second stage, which is headed to orbit with the payload, will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere.
With several companies planning to fill the sky with multitudes of communications satellites, there seems to be more than enough business for all rocket companies, at least for a few years. Two years ago, amazon announced that it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches from three companies (Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace) to launch more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.
amazon later announced that it would also purchase three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.
Blue Origin does not depend solely on amazon's business. In November, it secured a deal with AST SpaceMobile for several New Glenn launches. AST is building a cellular broadband network that will work directly with smartphones.
The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another target of Blue Origin. If successful, this flight would count as the first of two flights needed for the U.S. Space Force to certify the rocket is ready for national security satellites.
The ESCAPADE mission, replaced by the first New Glenn launch, could head to space on a subsequent New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.
Blue Origin is also targeting businesses beyond rockets.
The concept of space tugs like Blue Ring is not new, and there could be several uses for one spacecraft that could dock with another. A rocket launch could drop several satellites into a particular orbit, and a space tug could then move them to different destinations. Space tugs could also repair or refuel older satellites or get rid of dead pieces of space junk by pushing them back into the atmosphere to burn.
The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls the “pioneer” of the future Blue Ring spacecraft. The prototype will remain docked with New Glenn's second stage during the six-hour mission.
Multiple New Glenn launches will be used to move the Blue Moon lander into position to take astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA's Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. If the incoming Trump administration renews the Artemis program , Blue Origin's role in it could grow or shrink.
Bezos's amazon wealth means Blue Origin doesn't need to be an immediate success and is investing for the long term.
“I think it's going to be the best deal I've ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while,” Bezos said during the DealBook Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do incredible things.”
