Cape Canaveral: Founder of Amazon Jeff BezosCompany of Blue original It is set to launch its first orbital rocket next week, marking a watershed moment in the commercial space race currently dominated by Elon Musk. SpaceX.
Named New GlenThe rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:00 a.m. (0600 GMT) Wednesday with a backup window on Friday, according to a Federal Aviation Administration advisory.
Although Blue Origin hasn’t officially confirmed the launch date, excitement has been building since the successful “Hotfire” test on December 27.
“Next stop launch,” Bezos announced on X, sharing a video of the massive rocket’s engines roaring to life.
The NG-1 mission will carry a prototype Blue Ring, a Defense Department-funded spacecraft envisioned as a versatile satellite deployment platform, during a six-hour test flight. will remain in the second stage of the rocket.
This will mark Blue Origin’s long-awaited entry into profitability. Orbital launch Market after years of suborbital flights with its tiny New Shepard rocket, which carried passengers and payloads on short trips to the edge of space.
“The market is really in orbit,” Astralytical founder analyst Laura Forzic told AFP. “Suborbital can only take you so far — there are only so many payloads and customers for a quick ride to space.”
Space Baron
The milestone will also heighten the rivalry between Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, and Musk, the richest man, who has consolidated his dominance of SpaceX and is now in President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets have become industrial workhorses, serving customers from commercial satellite operators to the Pentagon and NASA, which rely on them to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Like the Falcon 9, New Glenn features a reusable first stage designed to land vertically on a ship at sea.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Lump said on X that the ship, named “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” reflects the challenge of landing a reusable rocket on the first try.
At 320 feet (98 m), the New Glenn dwarfs the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed to carry larger, heavier payloads. It slots between the Falcon 9 and its bigger brother, the Falcon Heavy, in cargo capacity while burning cleaner liquefied natural gas instead of kerosene and relying on fewer engines.
“If I were still a senior executive at NASA, I would be very happy to have some competition with the Falcon 9,” G. Scott Hubbard, a former NASA “Mars czar” now at Stanford University, told AFP. Competition has increased, he added. Can help reduce launch costs.
Politics in sport
For now, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, capturing a large share of the market while rivals such as United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab lag far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has an abiding passion for space. But while Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions populating the solar system with massive floating space colonies.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 — two years before Musk started SpaceX — but the company has grown at a much slower pace, reflecting a more cautious approach.
“The space community is impatient with Blue Origin’s very deliberate approach,” Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University and a former member of the National Space Council, told AFP.
If successful, New Glenn would offer the U.S. government “differential redundancy” — alternative systems that provide backup in case of failure, Pace said.
That could prove crucial as SpaceX plans to retire the Falcon 9 by the end of the decade in favor of the Starship, a prototype that relies on entirely unproven technologies.
Musk’s closeness to Trump has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, particularly with private astronaut Jared Isaacman — a business associate of Musk — poised to become the next head of NASA.
Bezos, however, is doing his bit by paying tribute to his former foe during a visit to the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence, while Amazon has said it will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Will donate dollars.