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After years of delay, the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is set for this week, ushering in a new era of competition between two feuding billionaires.
New Glenn is scheduled for liftoff no earlier than Friday, Jan. 10 during a three-hour launch window that opens at 1 a.m. ET, Blue Origin said. announced on Monday The rocket will depart from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, carrying Blue Origin’s. The Pathfinder blue ring for its first test flight. New Glenn’s inaugural launch will double as the rocket’s certification flight, paving the way for carrying national security payloads on future missions.
“This is our first flight and we’ve been rigorously preparing for it,” Jarrett Jones, New Glenn’s senior vice president, said in a statement. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a substitute for flying this missile. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we will learn, improve and apply this knowledge to our next launch.”“
Blue Origin, founded by the world’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos, has been developing the $2.5 billion New Glenn rocket for nearly a decade. The rocket, originally planned for its debut launch in 2020, has suffered several delays, however, largely due to the development of its engines. New Glenn is based on seven BE-4 engines, designed by Blue Origin, which have it needs extensive testing and redesign.
With the upcoming debut of New Glenn, Blue Origin can officially compete with industry favorite SpaceX, further fueling the rivalry between Bezos and his billionaire nemesis Elon Musk. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is a reusable suborbital rocket used primarily to launch space tourists on short trips above the Karman Line (the demarcation of space), doing so for the first time in July 2021. New Glenn, on the other hand, is a partially reusable, heavy rocket capable of lifting 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit. The 313-foot-tall (95-meter) rocket has a reusable first stage, powered by seven BE-4 methane engines. In comparison, SpaceX Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable missile, capable of carrying 63 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 26 metric tons to geostationary orbit.
New Glenn’s first payload, Blue Ring, is a spacecraft platform designed to provide “end-to-end services covering hosting, transportation, refueling, data transmission and logistics, including a ‘in-space’ cloud computing capabilities,” according to Blue Origin. It has been properly described as a “space truck, and will eventually serve commercial and government customers, and host payloads weighing up to 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms).
The rocket was originally scheduled to launch in November 2024, carrying a pair of NASA probes to Mars as part of its first flight. U The space agency has stopped preparations for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission in September for fear that New Glenn will not be ready in time. Instead, Blue Origin agreed to advance the second flight of New Glenn to accommodate the launch window of the Mars mission later this year.
Bezos’ space company finally regrouped last year, moving forward with preparations for New Glenn’s debut. The company replaced Bob Smith as CEO, hiring former Amazon exec David Limp in his place. Blue Origin also announced that it planned a unmanned landing on the Moon in 2025 using a prototype version of its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander, potentially beating SpaceX to the lunar surface – emphasis on “potentially”.
