Bezos’ Massive Rocket Is Lastly Prepared for Liftoff This Week

After years of delays, the launch of Blue Origin’s long-anticipated New Glenn rocket is ready for this week, starting a brand new period of competitors between two rocket billionaires.

New Glenn is scheduled for liftoff no sooner than Friday, January 10 throughout a three-hour launch window that opens at 1 a.m. ET, Blue Origin announced on Monday. The rocket will take off from Launch Advanced 36 at Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station, Florida, carrying Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder for its first check flight. New Glenn’s inaugural launch will double because the rocket’s certification flight, paving the best way for it to hold nationwide safety payloads on future missions.

“That is our first flight and we’ve ready rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, senior vice chairman of New Glenn, stated in an announcement. “However no quantity of floor testing or mission simulations are a alternative for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. It doesn’t matter what occurs, we’ll be taught, refine, and apply that data to our subsequent launch.“

Blue Origin, based by the second richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, has been growing the $2.5 billion New Glenn rocket for practically a decade. The rocket, initially scheduled for its debut launch in 2020, suffered a number of delays, nonetheless, largely to do with the event of its engines. New Glenn depends on seven BE-4 engines, designed by Blue Origin, which have required in depth testing and redesign.

With the upcoming debut of New Glenn, Blue Origin can formally compete with trade favourite SpaceX, additional fueling the rivalry between Bezos and his billionaire nemesis Elon Musk. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is a reusable suborbital rocket primarily used to launch area vacationers on temporary journeys above the Karman Line (the demarcation of area), doing so for the primary time in July 2021. New Glenn, then again, is {a partially} reusable, heavy-lift rocket able to lifting 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 13 metric tons to geostationary switch orbit. The 313-foot-tall (95-meter) rocket has a reusable first stage, powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines. By comparability, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is {a partially} reusable, heavy-lift rocket able to carrying 63 metric tons to low Earth orbit and 26 metric tons to geostationary orbit.

New Glenn’s first payload, Blue Ring, is a spacecraft platform designed to supply “end-to-end companies that span internet hosting, transportation, refueling, knowledge relay, and logistics, together with an ‘in-space’ cloud computing functionality,” in line with Blue Origin. It’s been aptly described as a “area truck, and can ultimately serve each business and authorities clients, and host payloads weighing as much as 6,600 kilos (3,000 kilograms).

The rocket was initially scheduled to launch in November 2024, carrying a pair of NASA probes to Mars as a part of its debut flight. The area company halted preparations for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers mission in September out of worry that New Glenn wouldn’t be prepared in time. As a substitute, Blue Origin agreed to maneuver up New Glenn’s second flight to accommodate the Mars mission’s launch window later this yr.

Bezos’ area firm lastly acquired it collectively final yr, shifting forward with preparations for New Glenn’s debut. The corporate changed Bob Smith as CEO, hiring former Amazon exec David Limp in his place. Blue Origin additionally introduced that it’s planning an uncrewed touchdown on the Moon in 2025 utilizing a prototype model of its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander, probably beating SpaceX to the lunar floor—emphasis on “probably.”