Blue Origin launches the New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida for the first time

A few minutes into the mission, the lower stage of the rocket successfully separated from the upper stage, which continued on its way to orbit. About 13 minutes into the mission, Blue Origin reported that the top 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 pad in the Atlantic Ocean, missing the mission’s second objective.

“We have achieved our main objective. “We reached orbit safely,” said Ariane Cornell, one of the leaders of Blue Origin.

The New Glenn project has been in development since 2012 and is the main competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite delivery market, Reuters notes. During the mission, the rocket’s first stage 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 very nervous about getting the reinforcement. Obviously, on the first flight an anomaly can occur at any stage of the mission, so anything can happen,” Bezos said in an interview with Reuters on January 13 before the 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 missions and satellite servicing, according to Reuters.

Successfully launching a spacecraft into a given orbit for 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 the 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 the competition with SpaceX, Reuters notes.

The New Glenn rocket is more than twice as powerful as SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rocket and has dozens of launch contracts worth billions of dollars, according to the agency.