The fundamental building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.
A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Mr. Bezos nearly a quarter of a century ago — sitting on a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its massive nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the pre-dawn darkness on Sunday, it may head into space for the first time.
“This was very much expected,” said Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could spark competition in a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is raking in big profits. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly reduced the cost of sending objects into space, they are wary of relying on a company subject to the whims of the world’s richest man.
“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep this market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as large as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system 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 could move satellites into Earth orbit.
The other company of Mr. Bezos — the behemoth of online retailer Amazon — also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Mr. Bezos, the world’s second-richest person after Musk, talks grandly about a future where millions of people live and work in space, about giant cylindrical habitats that rotate to provide artificial gravity, and about moving polluting industries into space. someday to allow Earth to return to a more pristine state.
“I know it sounds fantastic,” said Mr. Bezos during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December, “so I’m asking for the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a while. But it’s not fantastic.”
But those plans and hopes can’t take off without a rocket. “This is New Glenn, our orbiter,” said Mr. Bezos.
The 21st century space age is often portrayed as a race of billionaires rather than nations, but so far it hasn’t been a race at all. SpaceX, which Mr. Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Founded in 2000, Blue Origin has yet to put anything into orbit.
“I think a lot of people forget that Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX was founded,” said Mr. Harrison.
Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, which is taking off. It passes the 62-mile height considered the edge of space, but never comes close to reaching the speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour required to orbit the planet. New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness to space tourists, including Mr. Bezos, and in scientific experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses Blue Origin engines to power its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.
In 2015, with pomp and publicity, Mr. Bezos announced plans for the missile, which was not named at the time.
Mr. Bezos said it would be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin will build in Florida near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He pledged to start by the end of the decade.
The factory appeared — huge boxy buildings painted in the company’s signature bright blue hue — but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, did not.
Blue Origin continued to push the rocket’s debut date.
During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president overseeing New Glenn development, said he expected “multiple” launches of New Glenn in 2024. While touring the Blue Origin factory on February 2024. said it expected two launches by the end of the year.
The delays continued. The first flight of New Glenn, which was to carry two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to take measurements of the Martian atmosphere, was scheduled to launch in October.
But in September, NASA, doubtful that New Glenn would be ready in time, announced that it had withdrawn ESCAPADE from that inaugural launch.
Blue Origin said a prototype of the Blue Ring, the space tug, will fly instead. In early December, the complete rocket arrived at the launch site.
Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to grant a launch permit. This finally came on December 27th.
Later that day, Blue Origin conducted a test launch, with the countdown clock ticking down to zero and the rocket’s engines firing, sending out torrents of flame and smoke. But as predicted, the rocket remained firmly clamped and after 24 seconds, the engines were shut down – a final test to identify and correct errors.
Just at 1 a.m. ET on January 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down the engines, New Glenn will soar into space. The middle-of-the-night launch window, which extends until 4 a.m., results from air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for a large, untested missile.
The hope is that New Glenn’s debut is better late than never.
Last year, Mr. Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could accelerate its pace to one launch per month in 2025 and eventually double that or more.
No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launch of a new vehicle so quickly.
“That’s pretty significant,” said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of BryceTech, a space consulting firm in Alexandria, Va. But if Blue Origin can’t keep up with the pace it promised, its customers could also fall behind schedule.
Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, New Glenn aims to be partially reusable, with the booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform called Jacklyn, after Mr. Bezos.
For the first flight, the booster has been given the nickname So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.
On social networking site X, Dave Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, explained: “Why? No one has ever landed a reusable booster on the first try. However, we will make it and we humbly submit with good confidence in the landing. But as I said a few weeks ago, if we don’t, we’ll learn and keep trying until we do.”
Mr. Harrison said the reusable boosters, designed to be launched at least 25 times, would help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. The Vulcan from United Launch Alliance and the Ariane 6 rocket from Arianespace both fly only once and fall into the ocean.
The second stage, which is directed into orbit with the payload, will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere.
With several companies planning to fill the sky with a multitude of communications satellites, there seems to be more than enough business for all the rocket companies, at least for a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches from three companies — Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace — to build more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.
Amazon later announced that it was also buying three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.
Blue Origin doesn’t rely solely on Amazon’s business. In November, it won an agreement from AST SpaceMobile for multiple New Glenn launches. AST is building a cellular broadband network that will work directly with smartphones.
The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another goal of Blue Origin. If successful, this flight will count as the first of two flights required for the US space force to certify that the rocket is ready for national security satellites.
The ESCAPADE mission, dropped from the first New Glenn launch, could head into space on a later New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.
Blue Origin is also targeting businesses beyond rockets.
The idea of space tugs like the Blue Ring isn’t new, and there could be many uses for a spacecraft that could nest up to another. A rocket launch could drop multiple satellites into a specific orbit, and a space tug could then move them to different destinations. Space tugs could also repair or refuel older satellites, or dispose of dead pieces of space junk by pushing them back into the atmosphere to burn up.
The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is funding the flight of what Blue Origin calls a “pilot” for the future Blue Ring 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 enable the Blue Moon lander to carry astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA’s Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. If the new Trump administration renews the Artemis program, the Blue Origin’s role in this could grow or decline.
The wealth of Mr. Bezos at Amazon means Blue Origin doesn’t need immediate 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,” said Mr. Bezos during the DealBook Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do some pretty amazing things.”
