Blue Origin rejects New Glenn launch attempt – again

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Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, has canceled a second launch attempt of its 30-story New Glenn rocket.

The vehicle was scheduled to launch early Monday, but the company rejected that plan so engineers could work on resolving a technical issue with the vehicle.

On Monday evening, after about 16 hours without an update and no information about exactly what the problem was, Blue Origin announced on social media that it might make a second attempt during a three-hour launch window starting at 1 a.m. ET on Tuesday .

However, just a few hours later, Blue Origin announced that it would not attempt the overnight launch after all.

“We are postponing our NG-1 launch to no earlier than Thursday, January 16,” the company said in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

On that day, Blue Origin will have the same three-hour early morning launch window from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. ET.

The company did not immediately disclose why it changed course on plans to launch New Glenn on Tuesday morning. However, Blue Origin had previously warned that unfavorable weather conditions at the launch site could lead to further brush.

“The poor weather forecast for tonight at LC-36 could result in this window being missed,” the company said in a post Monday evening.

In the statement, Blue Origin also provided more details about the problem that engineers tried to fix in the last attempt.

“This morning’s brush was due to ice forming in a flush line of an auxiliary power unit that powers some of our hydraulic systems,” the company said.

A “purge line” is a pipe or hose that can be used to flush out unwanted gases or debris from a missile system.

This detail was more than Blue Origin offered in its launch attempt webcast on Monday. At the time, the company said only that engineers were struggling with “anomalies,” which is aerospace-speak for problems with the rocket that need to be addressed before the final go-ahead for launch.

“We are rejecting today’s launch attempt to resolve an issue with the vehicle subsystem,” said Ariane Cornell, vice president of in-space systems at Blue Origin.

At some point Monday morning, the countdown clock dropped to show less than 10 minutes before launch, but Blue Origin periodically added more time as engineers worked to fix outstanding issues. Ultimately, the issues could not be resolved in time before the launch window was scheduled to close at 4 a.m. ET.

A smooth first launch of New Glenn could be crucial as the company hopes to collect extensive data from that flight and pave the way for the rocket to quickly make an impact on the global launch industry. New Glenn is the first rocket developed by Blue Origin that will be capable of sending satellites into orbit – a feat that will be necessary for any company looking to challenge SpaceX’s long-standing dominance of the launch vehicle market.

Blue Origin declined to launch New Glenn and prepared for a busy week for space travel. Notably, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two lunar landers is scheduled to launch as early as 1:11 a.m. ET on Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, located next to Cape Canaveral. SpaceX will also launch the seventh test flight of its gigantic Starship rocket on Wednesday.