After several delays, the New Glenn rocket of the American space company Blue Origin successfully launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral for its first flight into space.
Photo: SITA/AP, John Raoux
After several delays, the New Glenn rocket of the American space company Blue Origin successfully launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral for its first flight into space.
The launch vehicle’s first stage failed to land as originally planned on the Jacklyn platform in the Atlantic several minutes after liftoff. However, the company emphasized that the primary goal was for the test satellite to reach orbit.
“Fantastic day,” declared launch commentator Ariane Cornell of Blue Origin.
The rocket, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, took off from Florida and took off from the same ramp from which NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer space probes launched half a century ago, the AP agency wrote. It is not yet clear where exactly the launch stage of the rocket, which was supposed to land on the platform in the Atlantic, landed.
“We achieved clean launch separation, clean launch stage separation, we got into orbit. We didn’t manage to land the carrier stage on the platform, but, man, we were close,” she added.
The 98-meter-tall rocket, equivalent to roughly the height of a 30-story building, carries an experimental platform designed to place satellites into orbit. New Glenn is intended to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in launching commercial and government satellites into orbit.
Behind Blue Origin is the billionaire Jeff Bezos, who founded the online store Amazon, the American company SpaceX is controlled by one of the richest people in the world, Elon Musk, who, with the Tesla car company, also focused on electric cars or with the Starlink company on global satellite internet connection. Musk is also very close to incoming US President Donald Trump.
Source: vat.pravda.sk
