Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket for the first time – hits target but misses landing peppermint

Blue Origin’s new flagship rocket, the New Glenn, hits the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday. The mission placed the company’s Blue Ring Pathfinder test satellite into orbit – the main objective of the flight.

“Liftoff! New Glenn begins its first ascent towards the stars,” Blue Origin said on social media platform X. The company posted a few minutes later.

Speaking during the launch livestream, Blue Origin executive Ariane Cornell said the mission had achieved its “key objective” of reaching orbit.

But he also confirmed “indeed, we have lost the booster,” which they were trying to land on a drone ship deployed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) below in the Atlantic Ocean.

About Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket

After several years of delay, the rocket launched at 2:03 a.m. (0703 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the US state of Florida.

Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket was launched from Florida, blasting off from the same pad that was used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft half a century earlier .

Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits.

New Glenn is the latest in a series of larger, new rockets to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s advanced Ariane 6 and NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS, which launches astronauts into space. Send is the successor to the Saturn V. moon.

The largest rocket is SpaceX’s Starship, at nearly 400 feet (123 m). Elon Musk said the seventh test flight of the completed rocket could take place on Thursday from Texas. He hopes to repeat what he did in October, capturing the returning booster on the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.

New Glenn was initially intended for NASA to send twin spacecraft to Mars. But the space agency dropped them from last October’s planned flight when it became clear the rocket wouldn’t be ready in time.

They will still fly on the New Glenn rocket, but not until spring at the earliest. Two small spacecraft, named Escapade, are meant to study the atmosphere and magnetic environment of Mars while orbiting the Red Planet.

Stages of the first flight of the New Glenn rocket

For this test, the satellite was expected to remain inside the second stage while orbiting the Earth. The mission was expected to last six hours, after which the second stage was placed in a safe position to remain in a higher, out-of-orbit orbit in accordance with NASA practices to reduce space junk.

The first stage booster missed landing on a barge in the Atlantic a few minutes after liftoff so it could be recycled, but the company insisted that the No. 1 objective was to get the test satellite to orbit.

“What a wonderful day,” said Blue Origin launch commentator Ariane Cornell.

New Glenn was scheduled to take off before dawn Monday, but was delayed due to ice accumulation in critical plumbing. The rocket is designed to carry spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and the Moon.

About Blue Origin

Founded by Bezos 25 years ago, Blue Origin is starting to pay passengers to the edge of space in 2021, including him. The small hop from Texas uses a small rocket named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. New Glenn, which honors John Glenn, is five times longer.

Blue Origin invested more than $1 billion in the reconstruction of the historic Complex 36 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the launch site for New Glenn. The pad is just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the company’s control centers and rocket factory.

Bezos, who was attending the launch from Mission Control, declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he doesn’t see Blue Origin competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has long dominated rocket-launching.

Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, with the next flight scheduled for this spring if all goes well.

“There’s room for a lot of winners,” Bezos told Rocket Factory over the weekend, adding that this is “the very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry ” ..to reduce the cost of access to space.”