In the very early hours of January 10, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will attempt the inaugural launch of its massive orbital rocket New Glenn. So far, the private space company has sent up into the atmosphere its New Shepard rocket, whose job is to send stuff to the edge of space and come back down. New Glenn, its biggest rocket yet, will actually get into orbit if everything goes according to plan on its maiden flight.
Named after the first American to orbit the Earth, NASA astronaut John Glenn, the 98-meter-tall rocket’s launch window opens at 1 am EST (6 am UTC) on January 10 and you can watch it live via Blue Origin from about an hour before liftoff. It will launch from Space Force’s Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36 in Florida. The launch, while a demonstration, is part of the US Space Force’s National Security Space Launch program. The payload is the Blue Ring Pathfinder, which will test the Blue Ring spacecraft platform, flight and ground systems, as well as the booster.
“This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn, said in a statement. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”
Similar to New Shepard’s suborbital rocket, New Glenn’s first stage is designed to be reusable, which is key to keeping costs down. The booster is designed to land on a barge called Landing Platform Vessel, which will be floating in the Atlantic. Blue Origin aims to land the booster offshore on its first try. This goal has been described as ambitious and for that reason, the booster has the funny name So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.
If the rocket is successful it might be a serious competitor for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 as it can launch a larger payload, though the Falcon Heavy can still take up more than New Glenn. Talking of SpaceX, it will attempt the seventh launch of its own megarocket Starship on January 13.
The test will be similar to the previous one, with Starship performing a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. It will also deploy 10 test Starlink “simulators”. SpaceX plans to retire Falcon 9 by the end of the decade and have Starship perform the deployment duty of satellites across different altitudes.
Blue Origin’s Lunar Lander, Blue Moon, is also expected to be launched on a New Glenn rocket, making the success of tomorrow’s launch important also for the Artemis mission.
