The space company Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, launched the New Glenn rocket for the first time from the US Space Force base at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The launch was broadcast on pages Blue Origin on social network X.
Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket for the first time from Cape Canaveral in Florida
Author: Anastasia Kossakovskaya
A few minutes after the start of the mission, the lower stage of the rocket successfully separated from the upper stage, which continued its path to orbit. About 13 minutes into the mission, Blue Origin reported that the upper portion of New Glenn had reached orbit.
However, launch commentators later confirmed that the rocket’s booster stage had disintegrated while attempting to land on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean, failing the second mission objective.
“We have achieved our main goal. We reached orbit safely,” noted Blue Origin co-CEO Arian Cornell.
The New Glenn project has been in development since 2012 and is the main competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite delivery market. notes Reuters. During the mission, the first stage of the rocket would autonomously return to the Jacklyn platform in the Atlantic Ocean, and the second stage would launch the Blue Ring Pathfinder payload into medium-Earth orbit.
“We are most nervous about landing the booster. Obviously, on the first flight, an anomaly can occur at any stage of the mission, so anything can happen,” noted Bezos in an interview with Reuters on January 13 before failed launch of New Glenn.
Inside New Glenn’s cargo bay is the first prototype of the Blue Ring platform, a spacecraft that Blue Origin plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions, according to Reuters.
Successfully launching a spacecraft into a given orbit the first time would be “a rare achievement for a space company,” the agency noted. “If we can do this, it will be a great success. Landing the booster will be “the icing on the cake,” Bezos added in an interview with Reuters.
Blue Origin has prioritized development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines in 2023. During the development of the rocket, the company changed three leaders, and the launch of the rocket was repeatedly delayed. Now the head of Blue Origin is former Amazon vice president Dave Limp, who, according to company employees, has brought a “sense of urgency” to competition with SpaceX, Reuters notes.
The New Glenn rocket is more than twice as powerful as SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 rocket and has dozens of launch contracts worth billions of dollars, according to the agency.
Cover photo: Miguel J. Rodríguez Carrillo/Getty Images
Source: rb.ru
