Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s firm Blue Origin is poised to launch its first orbital rocket subsequent week, marking a pivotal second within the industrial house race at the moment dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Named New Glenn, the rocket is scheduled to elevate off from Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station in Florida as quickly as Wednesday 1:00 am (0600 GMT), with a backup window on Friday, based on a Federal Aviation Administration advisory.
Whereas Blue Origin has not formally confirmed the launch date, pleasure has been constructing since a profitable “hotfire” check on December 27.
“Subsequent cease launch,” Bezos declared on X, sharing a video of the towering rocket’s engines roaring to life.
The NG-1 mission will carry a prototype of Blue Ring, a Protection Division–funded spacecraft envisioned as a flexible satellite tv for pc deployment platform, which can stay on board the rocket’s second stage throughout the six-hour check flight.
It would mark Blue Origin’s long-awaited entry into the profitable orbital launch market after years of suborbital flights with its smaller New Shepard rocket, which carries passengers and payloads on transient journeys to the sting of house.
“The market is absolutely orbital,” analyst Laura Forczyk, founding father of Astralytical, instructed AFP. “Suborbital can solely take you to this point—there are solely so many payloads and clients for a fast experience to house.”
Area barons
The milestone will even escalate the rivalry between Bezos, the world’s second-richest individual, and Musk, the wealthiest, who has cemented SpaceX’s dominance and is now in President-elect Donald Trump’s inside circle.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets have grow to be business workhorses, serving shoppers from industrial satellite tv for pc operators to the Pentagon and NASA, which depends on them to ferry astronauts to and from the Worldwide Area Station.
Like Falcon 9, New Glenn contains a reusable first stage designed to land vertically on a ship at sea.
The vessel, playfully named “So You are Telling Me There is a Likelihood,” displays the problem of touchdown a reusable rocket on the primary try, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp stated on X.
At 320 ft (98 meters), New Glenn dwarfs the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed to hold bigger, heavier payloads. It slots between Falcon 9 and its bigger sibling, Falcon Heavy, in cargo capability whereas burning cleaner liquid pure gasoline fairly than kerosene and counting on fewer engines.
“If I had been nonetheless a senior govt at NASA, I would be thrilled to lastly have some competitors to the Falcon 9,” G. Scott Hubbard, NASA’s former “Mars Czar” now at Stanford College, instructed AFP, including that elevated competitors might assist drive down launch prices.
Politics at play
For now, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, capturing the lion’s share of the market whereas rivals like United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab path far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has an everlasting ardour for house. However the place Musk goals of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisages populating the photo voltaic system with huge floating house colonies.
Bezos based Blue Origin in 2000—two years earlier than Musk began SpaceX—however the firm has progressed at a far slower tempo, reflecting a extra cautious method.
“There’s been impatience inside the house group over Blue Origin’s very deliberate method,” Scott Tempo, an area coverage analyst at George Washington College and a former member of the Nationwide Area Council, instructed AFP.
If profitable, New Glenn will provide the US authorities “dissimilar redundancy”—various programs that present backups if one fails, stated Tempo.
This might show very important as SpaceX plans to retire Falcon 9 by the top of the last decade in favor of Starship, a prototype that depends on not totally confirmed applied sciences.
Musk’s closeness to Trump has raised considerations about potential conflicts of curiosity, particularly with personal astronaut Jared Isaacman—a enterprise affiliate of Musk—slated to grow to be the following NASA chief.
Bezos, nonetheless, has been making his personal overtures, paying his respects to his former foe throughout a go to to the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence, whereas Amazon has stated it might donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.
© 2025 AFP
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