Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket for the first time on Thursday, marking a significant milestone for Jeff Bezos’ space company.
New Glenn roared off the launchpad in Florida during the early morning hours, achieving spaceflight and successfully reaching orbit in its long-anticipated debut mission. However, Blue Origin‘s attempt to land the rocket’s booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean was unsuccessful, as the booster was lost during atmospheric reentry.
Although founded 25 years ago, Bezos’ company had yet to begin flying to orbit — with its much smaller New Shepard rocket only flying people and research on short jaunts to the edge of space. New Glenn’s flight marks Blue Origin’s entrance into a market dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and is crucial to unlocking the centi-billionaire founder’s larger ambitions, CNBC notes.
No one was on board the New Glenn flight, which carried a single small test payload into space. The rocket was named to honor the late John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
Blue Origin plans to scale the cadence of New Glenn missions quickly, wanting to perform as many as 10 New Glenn launches this year. Originally targeted for a 2020 debut, the rocket faced years of delays.
Blue Origin rocket is the size of a 30-story skyscraper
A few minutes after launch, the rocket’s booster separated and returned back through the atmosphere. The booster — nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance” — was attempting to land on the company’s barge Jacklyn about 600 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, but fell short. Blue Origin’s webcast last showed the booster at an altitude of about 84,000 feet.
New Glenn is the size of a 30-story skyscraper at 322 feet tall, nearly as tall as the Saturn V rockets that carried the Apollo missions to the moon, and 23 feet in diameter. Blue’s rocket is powered by seven of the company’s BE-4 engines, together generating nearly 4 million pounds of thrust, and the nosecone of New Glenn is both wide and tall enough to launch three school buses into space at once.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane and is designed to be partially reusable, as Blue Origin aims to launch, land and re-launch each booster as many as 25 times.
In terms of mass delivered to orbit per launch, New Glenn fits between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, with Blue Origin’s vehicle designed to lift as much as 45,000 kilograms (or about 100,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit.
Already, Blue Origin has a foothold with New Glenn in the most lucrative part of the launch market: Flying for the military. Last year Blue Origin joined SpaceX and ULA in the Pentagon’s $5.6 billion National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, allowing the company to compete for contracts.
While Blue Origin has lagged SpaceX in the industry, Bezos has remained upbeat about his company’s potential.
“I think it’s going to be the best business that I’ve ever been involved in, but it’s going to take a while,” Bezos said recently.
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