The building blocks of Jeff Bezos’ space dreams are finally ready to go.
The New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company Mr. Bezos founded nearly a quarter-century ago — is on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It stands as tall as a 32-story building, and its massive nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the predawn darkness on Sunday, he may head into space for the first time.
“This has been long overdue,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could inject competition into the rocket industry as one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — scores a big win. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have dramatically reduced the cost of sending things into space, they are wary of relying on a single company subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.
“SpaceX clearly dominates the market in terms of launching larger, heavier payloads,” Harrison said. “There has to be a strong competitor to keep this market healthy. Blue Origin seems likely to be better positioned to be a competitor to SpaceX.
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as large as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing.
Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a NASA lunar lander called Blue Moon, and a space tug called Blue Ring — a vehicle that could move satellites into Earth orbit.
Bezos’ other company – online retail giant Amazon – also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of Internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Mr. Bezos, the world’s second-richest person, after Mr. Musk, also talks grandly about a future in which millions of people live and work in space, about massive cylindrical habitats that rotate to provide artificial gravity, and about moving polluting industries into space one day to allow Earth to return to a more pristine state. .
“I know this sounds fanciful, so please bear with me for a moment,” Mr. Bezos said during an interview at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December. “But it’s not fantasy.”
But those plans and hopes cannot be launched without a missile. “This is what the New Glenn orbiter is all about,” Bezos said.
The space age of the 21st century is often portrayed as a race of billionaires rather than a race of nations, but so far it has not been a race at all. SpaceX, which Mr. Musk started in 2002, launches Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put anything into orbit.
“I think a lot of people forget that Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Mr. Harrison said.
Blue Origin built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, that moves up and down. It passes at an altitude of 62 miles, which is considered the edge of space, but it does not come close to reaching the speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour needed to enter orbit around the planet. New Shepard’s flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Mr. Bezos himself, and for scientific experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines built by Blue Origin for New Glenn were also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, is using Blue Origin engines to boost its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.
In 2015, with great pomp and propaganda, Bezos announced plans for the rocket, which was not named after that.
Mr. Bezos said it will be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin will build in Florida near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He pledged to launch it by the end of the decade.
The factory, huge, boxy buildings painted in the company’s signature bright blue, appeared, but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach Earth’s orbit, did not.
Blue Origin has continued to push back the rocket’s debut date.
During an industry panel in 2023, Garrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president overseeing New Glenn’s development, said he expects “multiple” launches of New Glenn in 2024. While touring Blue Origin’s factory in February 2024, he said that Two operations are expected to be launched by the end of the year.
Delays continued. The maiden flight of New Glenn, which was to carry two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to make measurements of the Martian atmosphere, was scheduled to launch in October.
But in September, NASA, doubting that New Glenn would be ready in time, announced that it was pulling the ESCAPADE program from that inaugural launch.
The Blue Ring space tug prototype will fly instead, Blue Origin said. In early December, the rocket was fully launched to the launch pad.
Blue Origin was still waiting for the FAA to grant a license for the launch. It finally came on December 27th.
Later that day, Blue Origin conducted a launch rehearsal, during which the countdown clock dropped to zero and the rocket’s engines lit up and unleashed torrents of flame and smoke. But, as intended, the rocket remained firmly attached, and 24 seconds later, the engines were shut down, a final troubleshooting test.
As soon as 1 a.m. ET on January 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down the engines, New Glenn will soar toward space. The midnight launch window, which extends until 4 a.m., results from weather restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on a large, untested rocket.
The hope is that New Glen’s appearance will be better late than never.
Last year, Mr. Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could accelerate its pace to as many as one launch per month in 2025 and eventually double that or more.
No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has been able to accelerate the launch of a new vehicle so quickly.
“This is pretty big,” said Carissa Christensen, CEO of BryceTech, a space consulting firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. But if Blue Origin can’t keep up with the promised pace, its customers could also fall behind schedule.
Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, the New Glenn is intended to be partially reusable, with the booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform called Jacklyn, after Mr. Bezos’ mother.
On the first flight, the booster was called “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”
On the social networking site XDave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, explained: “Why? No one has succeeded in getting a reusable booster on the first try. However, we are striving to achieve this, and we humbly submit that we have great confidence in achieving this. But as I said a few weeks ago, if we don’t, we will learn and keep trying until we do.
The reusable boosters, designed to launch at least 25 times, will help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price, Mr. Harrison said. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket each currently fly just once and fall into the ocean.
The second stage, which heads into orbit with the payload, will burn up when it reenters the atmosphere.
With many companies planning to fill the skies with a large number of communications satellites, there appears to be enough business for all the rocket companies, at least for a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced it had signed contracts for as many as 83 launches from three companies — Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, and Arianespace — to launch more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.
Amazon later announced that it had also purchased three Falcon 9 rocket launches from SpaceX.
Blue Origin doesn’t rely solely on business from Amazon. In November, it won an agreement from AST SpaceMobile to conduct several New Glenn launches. AST is building a broadband cellular network that works directly with smartphones.
The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another goal for Blue Origin. If successful, this flight will be the first of two flights required for the US Space Force to ensure the rocket is ready for use with national security satellites.
The ESCAPADE mission, which launched from the first New Glenn launch, could head to space on a subsequent New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.
Blue Origin also aims to do business beyond rockets.
The concept of space tugs like Blue Ring is not new, and there could be several uses for a spacecraft that could be housed in another spacecraft. A rocket launch could drop several satellites into a given orbit, and a space tug could then transport them to different destinations. Space tugs can also repair old satellites, refuel them, or dispose of dead pieces of space junk by shoving them back into the atmosphere to burn up.
The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls the “Explorer” of the future Blue Ring spacecraft. The prototype will remain attached to New Glenn’s second stage during the six-hour mission.
Many of the New Glenn launches will be used to get the Blue Moon lander into a position to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA’s Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. If the incoming Trump administration revamps the Artemis program, it’s Blue Origin’s role It can be growing, or diminishing.
Mr. Bezos’ Amazon wealth means Blue Origin doesn’t need to be an immediate success, and he is investing for the long term.
“I think it will be the best business I’ve ever been involved in, but it will take time,” Mr. Bezos said during the DealBook Summit. “Blue Origin is going to do some pretty amazing things.”