Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company hailed “a new era” in commercial spaceflight on Thursday after its giant New Glenn rocket made a long-awaited successful maiden launch from Florida.
The spectacular early morning liftoff from Cape Canaveral space force station was a milestone moment for Bezos’s rivalry with fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has stolen a march in Nasa’s reliance on private industry for satellite and crewed launches in lower Earth orbit.
“My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Blue Origin for the tremendous amount of work in making today’s success possible, and to our customers and the space community for their continuous support. We felt that immensely today,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice-president at Blue Origin, said.
Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post, watched the launch of the mission known as NG-1 from the control console at the company’s Cape Canaveral headquarters. He did not make any immediate comment after the 2.03am ET (7.03am GMT) blastoff, but posted a succession of images and videos to X of New Glenn’s launch and 13-minute ascent into orbit.
Musk acknowledged his rival’s achievement in his own post on X, the social media platform he owns. “Well done Jeff Bezos, and the Blue Origin team,” he wrote.
The only dark spot on an otherwise triumphant day for Blue Origin was the failure to land the booster stage of the 320ft (98-metre) reusable rocket on a modified cargo ship, Jacklyn, named after Bezos’s mother, waiting in the Atlantic. The company said the booster was lost on descent.
But that was seen as a secondary objective for the inaugural mission of New Glenn, named for the pioneering Nasa astronaut and former US senator John Glenn, who became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.
“We knew landing our booster on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring,” Dave Limp, the Blue Origin chief executive, said.
Instead, company leaders were buoyant at the triumph of achieving the primary goal, reaching orbit for the first time, then receiving crucial systems data for up to six hours from the second-stage payload, the so-called Blue Ring Pathfinder that records and reports in-flight telemetry and other operational capabilities.
Musk’s ventures also include taking more than 50 astronauts into space onboard SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft since 2020. Although Blue Origin has closed the gap a little with Thursday’s New Glenn success, Bezos has said he does not consider the two companies as rivals.
“There’s room for lots of winners,” the billionaire said in an interview last weekend. “[This is the] very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry … to lower the cost of access to space.”
Thursday’s flight was the first of several planned for New Glenn in 2025, after years of delay and a further hiccup on Monday when ice forming on an auxiliary power unit caused this week’s first launch attempt to be scrubbed.
Future missions, the next scheduled for only a few weeks’ time, will carry payloads from private customers, including Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite broadband initiative.
Longer-term goals include Blue Origin’s partnership with Nasa to send crewed landers to the moon as part of the space agency’s Artemis program, as well as launching twin exploration satellites, Blue and Gold, to Mars next year – a project once set for New Glenn’s maiden flight before it was delayed last October.
New Glenn is five times larger than Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, which Bezos’s company has used to take paying passengers on sub-orbital rides since 2021. It joins Nasa’s giant Space Launch System, which some analysts believe will be axed under the incoming Trump administration, and SpaceX’s Starship in a new generation of heavy-lift rockets capable of carrying substantial payloads into deep space. Starship has flown six uncrewed test missions already, with a seventh scheduled for 5pm ET on Thursday from SpaceX’s Starbase complex at Boca Chica, Texas.
Nasa has invested in SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop lunar landers for the Artemis program, currently scheduled to return humans to the moon in 2027 for the first time in more than half a century.
Blue Origin’s lander, Blue Moon, will make its debut on the third lunar touchdown by astronauts, Artemis 5, currently scheduled for no earlier than March 2030.
The Associated Press contributed to reporting
