Cape Canaveral (AFP) – Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, called off the inaugural launch of its huge new rocket again on Monday evening after facing weather issues. The company said it would aim for early Thursday morning at the earliest, with a new three-hour window starting at 1:00 am (0600 GMT). An initial test launch of the towering 320-foot (98-meter) rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honor of legendary American astronaut John Glenn, was scrubbed early Monday morning after repeated halts during the countdown. The company later said it had discovered an icing issue on a purge line and would aim for a possible early Tuesday morning launch, but that weather conditions were unfavorable. Shortly after 9:00 pm Monday (0200 GMT Tuesday), Blue Origin announced the launch had been postponed.
With the mission, dubbed NG-1, Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: fellow tech innovator Elon Musk. Musk’s company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, which have become vital for the commercial sector, Pentagon and NASA. “SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor…this is great,” G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs. Upping the high-stakes rivalry, SpaceX also plans another orbital test later this week of Starship — its gargantuan new-generation rocket.
When New Glenn does fly, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first-stage booster on a drone ship stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has made such landings now routine, but this will be Blue Origin’s first shot at the sci-fi feat. High seas last week caused the New Glenn launch to be pushed back several days. Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of roughly 12,000 miles above the surface. A Defense Department-funded prototype of an advanced spaceship called Blue Ring, which could one day journey through the solar system, will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight. Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets — used for suborbital tourism — but they are five times smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.
Physically, the gleaming white New Glenn dwarfs SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads. It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks.
Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink. For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals — United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab — trail far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space. But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, “humanity’s blue origin.” If New Glenn succeeds, it will provide the US government “dissimilar redundancy” — valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University.
© 2024 AFP
