Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company successfully launched its New Glenn rocket and landed the booster on a platform at sea, marking a major technical breakthrough for the company.
The 320-foot-tall rocket lifted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly before 4 p.m. Eastern time and successfully separated the rocket’s first-stage booster.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company successfully launched its New Glenn rocket and landed the booster on a platform at sea, marking a major technical breakthrough for the company.
The 320-foot-tall rocket lifted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly before 4 p.m. Eastern time and successfully separated the rocket’s first-stage booster.
The successful second launch for New Glenn represents a major step forward for Blue Origin as it seeks to compete with the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which has become the dominant provider of launch services for NASA, the military and private launch providers. SpaceX, by comparison, has carried out twelve test launches of its 403-foot Starship rocket, though with mixed success. (Bezos, who also founded Amazon, owns The Washington Post)
Blue Origin’s rocket, named for astronaut John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit, is far larger and more powerful than the company’s previous rockets. The earlier New Shepard used a single engine to ferry rich tourists to outer space for a few minutes of weightlessness. New Glenn is designed to carry larger payloads such as satellites and NASA spacecraft and be reused a minimum of 25 times.
New Glenn’s first launch in January was a partial success. The rocket successfully reached orbit, but an attempt to prove the rocket’s reusability by landing it on a platform at sea was unsuccessful.
In its second launch, New Glenn carried a pair of NASA spacecraft that will head to Mars and orbit the planet, collecting information about how its magnetic fields change over time, part of a mission the space agency calls Escapade.
Analysts said NASA’s involvement in the second launch marks a win for Blue Origin at a time when SpaceX’s Starship is still in testing.
“The fact that [Blue Origin] has graduated to a paying customer does demonstrate a level of comfort with the New Glenn vehicle, even though it’s just the second launch,” said Clayton Swope, an aerospace analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
SpaceX’s Starship, by comparison, has launched 11 times, conducting various test maneuvers such as releasing dummy satellites into orbit. Five tests ended in some sort of explosive failure.
With a successful second launch, Blue Origin “may be able to argue that they have a reliable launch vehicle,” Swope said. “Granted, we’ve seen a lot of attempts for SpaceX but I don’t think anyone would say we have a reliable launch vehicle in Starship at this point.”
New Glenn also presents potential business opportunities for Blue Origin. The space company has an agreement with Amazon to provide launches for Amazon Leo, formerly known as Kuiper, a planned satellite communications network to far-flung parts of the globe that are outside the reach of existing internet services. It also has an agreement with AST SpaceMobile, a satellite internet venture that partners with AT&T, Verizon and others, to provide direct-to-phone internet service.
Those partnerships have clear parallels to Starlink, a SpaceX-owned internet service that already has thousands of small satellites in orbit and generates billions of dollars in revenue for the Musk-led company.
The Thursday launch was canceled twice before. First, on Sunday afternoon, a planned launch was scrubbed because of cloud formations that posed a risk of lightning strike. A second attempt scheduled for Wednesday was canceled because of “highly elevated solar activity.”
There also had been concerns about whether the government shutdown could interfere with Blue Origin’s launch. A Federal Aviation Administration emergency order issued last week prohibited space launches during the day, but launch providers were told that exemptions could be granted for military and NASA missions, industry officials said.
The post Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launches, lands on sea-based platform
appeared first on Washington Post.
