After more than a decade of development, hype and pent-up demand, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture Blue Origin will at long last attempt to put a rocket into orbit.
New Glenn, originally intended to launch as early as 2020, is slated to fly on Sunday out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a nearly four-hour launch window that begins at 1 a.m. local time.
The mission aims to put a Blue Origin test satellite into orbit and then land the rocket’s lower portion on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
The flight will serve as a critical demonstration for Blue Origin, which has struggled for years to execute on its ambitious plans for space exploration. Though the company has shuttled paying tourists to the edge of space and back, it has lacked the capability of sending people and satellites to orbit.
That stands in stark contrast to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has been in operation for much of the same time as Blue Origin but has far surpassed Bezos’ firm in launch capability. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is the most prolific orbital vehicle globally. Like Musk, Bezos is one of the world’s richest people with numerous business interests, including having founded Amazon.com Inc. and owning the Washington Post.
A successful launch of New Glenn would at last put the company in an elite circle of US ventures that can send satellites to orbit, as well as put Blue Origin on a path toward challenging SpaceX’s ironclad grip on the launch market.
But perhaps even more critical for the company, New Glenn stands to become the much needed centerpiece for Bezos and his long-term dreams for the future of spaceflight. In the immediate future, New Glenn will help the company clear a $10 billion backlog in customer contracts. Longer term, Blue Origin plans to use the rocket to launch moon missions and eventually whole industries off the planet.
“We need to lower the cost of access to space,” Bezos said at the NYT Dealbook Summit last year.
“We can set up the preconditions where the next generation, or the generation after that, will be able to move polluting industry off Earth, and then this planet will be maintained as it should be,” he added later.
Long Road
Before any of that can happen, though, New Glenn needs to fly, and it’s been a long and bumpy road to get to the launchpad.
Bezos formally announced plans for New Glenn in 2016, though the rocket had been in development many years prior, with a goal of flying it before the end of the decade.
But Blue Origin ran into numerous hurdles and delays – particularly with the development of the vehicle’s main BE-4 engines, built in-house. The engines were finished years behind schedule but have since successfully powered the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.
And unlike SpaceX, which performs frequent test flights and breaks things along the way, Blue Origin has taken a more traditional engineering approach: years of painstaking development behind the scenes before attempting a full test flight, with the goal of minimizing any unplanned explosions.
Most new rockets do fail on their first launch, though. A successful debut would showcase Blue Origin’s engineering chops and mark a major achievement in Bezos’ attempt to catch up to SpaceX.
“Pulling it off would send a message,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive officer of BryceTech, a space analytics firm. “A very meticulous performance would map to the ‘we took our time and got it right’ story.”
Blue Origin also hopes to show New Glenn’s potential for reusability. Similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the main core of New Glenn is designed to come back to Earth after launch and land upright on a barge nicknamed Jacklyn. Blue Origin aims to fly each booster a minimum of 25 times.
Sticking the landing is ultimately a secondary objective for this launch, but if Blue Origin can pull it off, it’ll make the company just the second one to perform this kind of landing technique after SpaceX.
“They have shown that they are just as ardent believers in reusability and some cutting edge technologies that legacy industry had shunned,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a consulting firm.
Customer Demand
New Glenn will be launching a demonstration satellite designed to test technologies for the company’s Blue Ring initiative, which aims to build satellites that can service other spacecraft in orbit.
Originally, New Glenn’s inaugural flight was supposed to fly satellites to Mars for NASA. However, Blue Origin switched up the manifest when it realized New Glenn wouldn’t be ready to launch in the fall, when Mars was closest to Earth.
Blue Origin plans to use this launch as one of a handful it needs to perform in order to receive certification from the US Defense Department to loft sensitive national security satellites.
And even with all of the delays, the company still managed to book significant commercial missions to launch satellites for Telesat, AST Space Mobile and Amazon.
Blue Origin hasn’t stated publicly how much one flight on the New Glenn costs, though Henry says the company has “priced contracts very competitively with SpaceX.”
New Glenn also boasts some capabilities the Falcon 9 doesn’t have. For one, it can launch more mass to orbit per mission than SpaceX’s workhorse rocket and send heavier payloads to higher orbits.
Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to develop its new Starship rocket, which is slated to become the most powerful, commercially operational rocket on the planet and could potentially overshadow New Glenn’s capabilities.
But even then, it’s likely there will be demand for New Glenn.
“They’re not SpaceX,” Henry said of Blue Origin. “And there are plenty of companies out there that are waiting for an alternative ride to space.”
