The fundamental building block for Jeff Bezos' space dreams is finally ready for launch.
A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company Mr. Bezos founded 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 bulky nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in use today.
It could launch into space for the first time in the pre-dawn darkness on Sunday.
“This has 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 could inject competition into a rocket company where one company — Elon Musk's SpaceX — is making big profits. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX's innovations that have significantly lowered the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company subject to the whims of the world's richest person.
“SpaceX clearly dominates” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There has to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”
New Glenn is bigger than SpaceX's current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big 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 in orbit.
Mr Bezos' other company – the giant 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 Mr. Musk, also talks grandly about a future where millions of people live and work in space, about immense cylindrical habitats that rotate to provide artificial gravity, and about moving polluting industries to space. one day to allow Earth to return to a more pristine state.
“I know this sounds fantastic,” Mr. Bezos said during an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December, “so I beg the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it's not fantastic.”
But those plans and hopes cannot 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 hasn't been a race at all. SpaceX, which Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has not yet 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 a smaller rocket, New Shepard, that goes up and down. It passes the 60-mile altitude considered the edge of space, but never approaches the speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour needed to orbit the planet. The New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Mr. Bezos himself, and for scientific experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a rival rocket company, is using the Blue Origin engines for the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which was successfully launched twice last year.
In 2015, Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, which at the time had no name, with pomp and ceremony.
Mr. Bezos said it would be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin would build in Florida, near NASA's Kennedy Space Center. He promised it would be launched by the end of the decade.
The factory appeared – giant square buildings painted with the company's signature bright blue hue – but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit, did not.
Blue Origin continued to delay the date of the rocket's debut.
During a 2023 industry panel, Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president at Blue Origin overseeing New Glenn's development, said he expected “multiple” New Glenn launches in 2024. While touring the Blue Origin factory in February 2024, he said he expected two launches by the end of the year.
The delays continued. The debut flight of New Glenn, which would carry two identical spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission to make measurements of the Martian atmosphere, was scheduled to launch in October.
But in September, NASA, unsure whether New Glenn would be ready on time, announced it had pulled ESCAPADE from its first launch.
Blue Origin said a prototype of Blue Ring, the space tug, would fly instead. The entire rocket rolled out to the launch pad in early December.
Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to license the launch. That finally came on December 27.
Later that day, Blue Origin held a launch rehearsal, with the countdown clock ticking down to zero and the rocket's engines lighting up, releasing torrents of flame and smoke. But as intended, the rocket remained firmly clamped and after 24 seconds the engines were shut down – a final test to troubleshoot and correct faults.
Starting at 1 a.m. Eastern time on January 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down its engines, New Glenn will fly into space. The middle-of-the-night launch window, which extends to 4 a.m., is the result of air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on a large, untested rocket.
The hope is that New Glenn's debut is better late than never.
Last year, Mr Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could pick up the pace to as many as one launch per month by 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 quite substantial,” said Carissa Christensen, CEO of BryceTech, a space consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. But if Blue Origin can't keep up the pace it's 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 named Jacklyn, after Mr Bezos' mother.
For its first flight, the booster has been nicknamed So You're Telling Me There's a Chance.
On social media site X, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp explained: “Why? No one landed a reusable booster on the first try. Still, we go for it and submit humbly, with good faith in landing it. But like 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 launch at least 25 times, would help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan and Arianespace's Ariane 6 rocket currently both fly only once and then fall into the ocean.
The second stage, which will orbit Earth with the payload, will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere.
With several companies planning to fill the skies with loads 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 carry more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.
Amazon later announced it would also purchase three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.
Blue Origin does not rely solely on business from Amazon. In November, it won a deal from AST SpaceMobile for several new Glenn launches. AST is building a mobile broadband network that will work directly with smartphones.
The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another target for Blue Origin. If successful, this flight would rank as the first of two flights required by the US Space Force to certify the rocket as ready for national security satellites.
The ESCAPADE mission, which grew out of the first New Glenn launch, could launch into space with a later New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.
Blue Origin also focuses on things beyond rockets.
The concept of space tugs like Blue Ring is not new, and there could be several uses for a spacecraft that could nestle against another spacecraft. A rocket launch could deliver several satellites to a given orbit, and a space tug could then move them to different destinations. Space tugs can 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 sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls the “pathfinder” for 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 get the Blue Moon lander into position to deliver astronauts to the moon's surface during NASA's Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. If the new Trump administration renews the Artemis program , Blue Origin's role in this could change. grow or decrease.
Mr Bezos' wealth in Amazon means Blue Origin doesn't have to be an immediate success, and he is investing for the long term.
“I think this will be the best business I've ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while,” Mr. Bezos said at the DealBook Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do some very amazing things.”
