The launch of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket could give SpaceX some competition

January 11: This article has been updated to reflect a one-day delay in the start of testing.

The building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.

A New Glenn rocket – built by Blue Origin, the rocket company Mr Bezos founded almost 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 voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in use today.

It could fly into space for the first time in the darkness before dawn on Monday.

“This has been expected for a very long time,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.

New Glenn could rival a rocket business in which one company – Elon Musk’s SpaceX – is making big profits. While companies and governments applaud SpaceX’s innovations, which have significantly reduced the cost of sending goods into space, they are wary of relying on a company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.

“SpaceX clearly dominates” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There has to be a viable competitor to keep this market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”

New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current work 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 in Earth orbit.

Mr Bezos’ other company – the giant online retailer Amazon – also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Mr. Bezos, the world’s second-richest person after Mr. Musk, also speaks grandly of a future in which millions of people live and work in space, of vast cylindrical habitats that rotate to create artificial gravity, and of relocation of polluting ones Industries into space one day so that Earth can return to a more pristine state.

“I know that sounds fantastic,” Mr. Bezos said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December, “so I’m asking this audience to indulge me in having a moment with me. “But it’s not fantastic.”

But without a rocket, these plans and hopes cannot be put into action. “This is what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about,” Mr. Bezos said.

The 21st century space age is often portrayed as a race of billionaires rather than nations, but so far it has not been a race at all. SpaceX, which Mr. Musk founded in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets every few days. Blue Origin was founded in 2000 and has yet to launch anything into orbit.

“I think a lot of people forget that Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Mr. Harrison said.

Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, that flies 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 required to enter orbit around the planet. The New Shepard flights have given space tourists, including Mr. Bezos himself, and scientific experiments a few minutes of weightlessness.

The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn have also proven to be a success. United Launch Alliance, a rival rocket company, is using the Blue Origin engines to power its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.

In 2015, Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, which at the time had no name, with pomp and publicity.

Mr. Bezos said it would be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin would build in Florida near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He promised to bring it to market by the end of the decade.

The factory appeared – gigantic, boxy buildings in the company’s signature bright blue color – but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach Earth’s orbit, did not appear.

Blue Origin kept pushing back the date of the rocket’s debut.

During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president at Blue Origin overseeing New Glenn’s development, said he expects “multiple” New Glenn launches in 2024. During a tour of the Blue Origin factory in February In 2024 he said: He said he expects two launches by the end of the year.

The delays continued. The first flight of New Glenn, which would carry two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to measure the Martian atmosphere, was scheduled to launch in October.

But in September, NASA announced that it had pulled ESCAPADE from that first launch because it doubted New Glenn would be ready on time.

Blue Origin said a prototype of the Blue Ring space tug would fly instead. At the beginning of December, the full rocket rolled to the launch pad.

Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to grant a license to launch. It finally happened on December 27th.

Later that day, Blue Origin conducted a launch test in which the countdown clock ticked down to zero and the rocket’s engines lit up, releasing streams of flame and smoke. But as planned, the rocket remained firmly clamped and after 24 seconds the engines were switched off – a final test to sort out and correct problems.

Once January 13th begins at 1 a.m. Eastern time, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time New Glenn will not shut down its engines but will ascend toward space. The middle-of-the-night launch window, which extends to 4 a.m., is due to air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on a large, untested rocket. Planned launch attempts on January 10 and 12 were postponed due to choppy seas in the Atlantic Ocean, where the launch vehicle was scheduled to land.

The hope is that New Glenn’s debut comes better late than never.

Last year, Mr. Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could accelerate its pace to up to one launch per month in 2025 and eventually double or even increase that pace.

No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launch of a new vehicle so quickly.

“That’s quite a lot,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of BryceTech, a space consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. But if Blue Origin can’t meet the promised pace, its customers could also fall behind.

Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, the New Glenn is said to be partially reusable. The carrier is scheduled to land in the Atlantic on a floating platform called Jacklyn, named after Mr. Bezos’ mother.

For its first flight, the booster was nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.”

On social media site X, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp explained: “Why? No one got a reusable booster on their first try. Yet we strive and humbly yield, confident that we can do it. But like I said a few weeks ago, if we don’t, we’ll learn and keep trying until we get there.”

Mr. Harrison said the reusable boosters, designed for at least 25 launches, would help Blue Origin compete on price with SpaceX. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket currently fly only once each and then land in the ocean.

The second stage, which goes into orbit with the payload, burns up upon re-entry into the atmosphere.

With several companies planning to fill the skies with a variety of communications satellites, there appears to be more than enough business for all rocket makers, at least for a few years. Two years ago, Amazon said it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches from three companies – Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace – to carry more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.

Amazon later announced that it would also purchase three Falcon 9 launchers from SpaceX.

Blue Origin doesn’t rely solely on Amazon’s business. In November, it received a contract from AST SpaceMobile for multiple New Glenn launches. AST is building a mobile broadband network that will work directly with smartphones.

The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Defense Department is another goal of Blue Origin. If successful, this flight would be considered the first of two flights needed by the US Space Force to certify the rocket as ready for national security satellites.

The ESCAPADE mission, which followed the first New Glenn launch, could go to space on a subsequent New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.

Blue Origin is also pursuing businesses beyond rockets.

The concept of space tugs like the Blue Ring is not new, and there could be multiple uses for a spacecraft that could cuddle up to another. A rocket launch could put multiple satellites into a specific orbit, and a space tug could then carry them to different destinations. Space tugs could also repair or refuel older satellites or dispose of dead pieces of space debris 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 a “pathfinder” for future Blue Ring spacecraft. The prototype will remain attached to New Glenn’s second stage throughout the six-hour mission.

Multiple New Glenn launches will be used to position the Blue Moon lander to take astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA’s Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. As the new Trump administration overhauls the Artemis program, Blue Origin’s role in it could grow or diminish.

Mr Bezos’ wealth in the Amazon means Blue Origin doesn’t have to be an instant success and he 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,” Mr. Bezos said during the DealBook Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do some very amazing things.”