January 11: This article was updated to reflect the postponement of the test launch by one day.
The basic building blocks for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams are finally ready for launch.
A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter-century ago — sits on a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the early morning darkness on Monday, it may head into space for the first time.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn can compete in the rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly reduced the cost of sending cargo into space, they are wary of relying on a company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest man.
SpaceX clearly dominates the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep this market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably best positioned to compete with SpaceX.”
The New Glen is bigger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as the Starship, fully reusable rocket system that 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 will carry satellites to Earth. can rotate in the orbit of
Mr Bezos’s other company – online retailer Amazon – also has big space plans. Project Kuipera constellation of Internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Mr. Bezos, the world’s second-richest person after Mr. Musk, also raves about a future where millions of people live and work in space, in enormous cylindrical habitats orbiting to provide artificial gravity. About moving homes, and polluting industries into space. To allow the Earth to someday return to a more primitive state.
“I know it sounds fantastic,” Mr. Bezos said During an interview at the New York Times’ Deal Book Summit In December, “So I ask this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it’s not fantastic.”
But those plans and hopes can’t get off the ground without a rocket. “That’s 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’s not a race at all. SpaceX, which Mr. Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put 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 New Shepard, a small rocket that goes up and down. It passes through an altitude of 62 miles that is 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. New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Mr. Bezos himself, and for science experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin has built for the New Glen are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses a Blue Origin engine for the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which launched twice last year.
In 2015, with much fanfare, Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, which at the time did not have a name.
It will be manufactured in a factory that Blue Origin will build near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Mr. Bezos said. He promised that it would start by the end of the decade.
The factory appeared—huge buildings painted with the company’s signature bright blue—but the rocket, later named New Glenn, after John Glenn, the first American to reach Earth’s orbit, did not. happened
Blue Origin kept pushing back Rocket’s debut date.
During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president overseeing NewGlen’s development, said he expects “multiple” NewGlen launches in 2024. Visiting the Blue Origin factory in February 2024He said he expects two launches by the end of the year.
The delay continued. The first flight of New Glenn, which was to carry two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to measure the Martian atmosphere, was scheduled to begin in October.
But in September, NASA, doubting that New Glenn would be ready in time, announced that it had pulled ESCAPADE from that inaugural launch.
Blue Origin said a prototype of the Blue Ring, a space tug, would fly instead. In early December, the completed rocket moved onto the launch pad.
Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a license for the launch. It finally arrived on December 27.
Later that day, Blue Origin rehearsed the launch, the countdown clock ticking down to zero and the rocket’s engines firing up and releasing a storm of flames and smoke. But, as intended, the rocket stayed firmly shut, and after 24 seconds, the engines were shut down — a final test to iron out the flaws.
As soon as 1 a.m. ET on January 13, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down the engines, New Glenn will be heading for space. The midnight launch window, which extends to 4 a.m., is the result of air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for a large, untested rocket. Launch attempts scheduled for January 10 and 12 were postponed due to choppy seas in the Atlantic Ocean where the booster is intended to land.
Hopefully, New Glen’s debut is better late than never.
Last year, Mr Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could accelerate its pace to one launch a month in 2025 and eventually It can be double or more.
No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launch of a new vehicle.
“It’s pretty significant,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of BryceTech, a space consulting company in Alexandria, Va. But if Blue Origin can’t keep up with its promised pace, its customers could fall behind schedule, too.
Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, the New Glenn is intended to be partially reusable, with a booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform called Jacklin, Mr. Bezos’s name. In the name of mother.
For the first flight, the booster is nicknamed so you’re telling me there’s a chance.
X on a social media siteBlue Origin chief executive Dave Lump explained: “Why? No one has landed a reusable booster on the first try. Still, we’re going for it, and with good faith in landing it with humility. But like I said a few weeks ago, if we don’t, we’ll learn and keep trying until we do.
The reusable boosters, designed to be launched at least 25 times, cost Blue Origin with SpaceX, Mr. Harrison said. Will help to compete. Both United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket currently only fly once and land in the ocean.
The second stage, which carries the payload to orbit, will burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere.
With several companies planning to fill the sky with many communication satellites, it seems that there is enough business for all the rocket companies for at least a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches with three companies — Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Ariane Space — to lift more than 3,000 Cooper satellites.
Amazon later announced that it was also buying three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.
Blue Origin is not entirely dependent on Amazon’s business. In November, it won a contract AST Space Mobile For several New Glen launches. AST is building a cellular broadband network to work directly with smartphones.
Another target for Blue Origin is the lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense. If successful, the flight would be the first of two flights required by the U.S. Space Force to certify the rocket as ready to carry national security satellites.
The ESCAPADE mission, which first collided with the New Glenn launch, could go into space with a later New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.
Blue Origin also aims to do business beyond rockets.
The concept of space tugs like the Blue Ring is not new, and a spacecraft that can nest into another can have many uses. A rocket launch can launch several satellites into a particular orbit, and a space tug can then transport them to different destinations. Space tugs can also repair or refuel old satellites or push dead pieces of space junk back into the atmosphere for incineration and disposal.
The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls a “pathfinder” for future blue-colored spacecraft. The prototype will remain attached to New Glenn’s second stage during the six-hour mission.
Several new Glenn launches will be used to transport the Blue Moon lander to the lunar surface during NASA’s Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. increase, or decrease.
Mr. Bezos’ Amazon wealth means Blue Origin doesn’t need instant success, and is investing for the long term.
“I think it’s going to be the best business I’ve ever been involved in, but it’s going to take some time,” Mr. Bezos said during the Dell Book Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do something pretty amazing.”