Bezos’ Big Rocket Is Finally Ready for Liftoff This Week

After years of delays, the motorboat of Blue Origin’s long-anticipated New Glenn rocket is acceptable for this week, opening a caller epoch of contention betwixt 2 rocket billionaires.

New Glenn is scheduled for liftoff nary earlier than Friday, January 10 during a three-hour motorboat model that opens astatine 1 a.m. ET, Blue Origin announced connected Monday. The rocket volition instrumentality disconnected from Launch Complex 36 astatine Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, carrying Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder for its archetypal trial flight. New Glenn’s inaugural motorboat volition treble arsenic the rocket’s certification flight, paving the mode for it to transportation nationalist information payloads connected aboriginal missions.

“This is our archetypal formation and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, elder vice president of New Glenn, said successful a statement. “But nary magnitude of crushed investigating oregon ngo simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s clip to fly. No substance what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and use that cognition to our adjacent launch.“

Blue Origin, founded by the 2nd richest antheral successful the world, Jeff Bezos, has been processing the $2.5 cardinal New Glenn rocket for astir a decade. The rocket, primitively scheduled for its debut motorboat successful 2020, suffered respective delays, however, mostly to bash with the improvement of its engines. New Glenn relies connected 7 BE-4 engines, designed by Blue Origin, which person required extended investigating and redesign.

With the upcoming debut of New Glenn, Blue Origin tin officially vie with manufacture favourite SpaceX, further fueling the rivalry betwixt Bezos and his billionaire nemesis Elon Musk. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is simply a reusable suborbital rocket chiefly utilized to motorboat abstraction tourists connected little journeys supra the Karman Line (the demarcation of space), doing truthful for the archetypal clip successful July 2021. New Glenn, connected the different hand, is simply a partially reusable, heavy-lift rocket susceptible of lifting 45 metric tons to debased Earth orbit and 13 metric tons to geostationary transportation orbit. The 313-foot-tall (95-meter) rocket has a reusable archetypal stage, powered by 7 methane-burning BE-4 engines. By comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is simply a partially reusable, heavy-lift rocket susceptible of carrying 63 metric tons to debased Earth orbit and 26 metric tons to geostationary orbit.

New Glenn’s archetypal payload, Blue Ring, is simply a spacecraft level designed to supply “end-to-end services that span hosting, transportation, refueling, information relay, and logistics, including an ‘in-space’ unreality computing capability,” according to Blue Origin. It’s been aptly described arsenic a “space truck, and volition yet service some commercialized and authorities customers, and big payloads weighing up to 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms).

The rocket was primitively scheduled to motorboat successful November 2024, carrying a brace of NASA probes to Mars arsenic portion of its debut flight. The space bureau halted preparations for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers ngo successful September retired of fearfulness that New Glenn wouldn’t beryllium acceptable successful time. Instead, Blue Origin agreed to determination up New Glenn’s 2nd formation to accommodate the Mars mission’s motorboat model aboriginal this year.

Bezos’ abstraction institution yet got it unneurotic past year, moving up with preparations for New Glenn’s debut. The institution replaced Bob Smith arsenic CEO, hiring erstwhile Amazon exec David Limp successful his position. Blue Origin besides announced that it’s readying an uncrewed landing connected the Moon successful 2025 utilizing a prototype mentation of its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander, perchance beating SpaceX to the lunar surface—emphasis connected “potentially.”