By BlueShift and AFP | 2025-01-13

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- Blue Origin will have to wait a little longer for the long-anticipated maiden orbital flight of its brand-new rocket after a launch attempt dragged on for hours before being cancelled for unspecified technical issues.

The towering 98-meter rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honor of legendary astronaut John Glenn, was scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a three-hour window starting at 1am local time January 13.

But the countdown repeatedly stalled as teams scrambled to resolve "anomalies," before the mission was "scrubbed" at about 3:10am -- a common occurrence in the space industry but disappointing nonetheless for the hundreds of thousands of spectators who stayed up to watch the live feed.

"We are standing down today's launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window," Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin executive, said on the webcast.

"We are reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt," she added.

With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than he is: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, vital for the commercial sector, the Pentagon and NASA.

Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000 and celebrated his 61st birthday on Sunday, watched events unfold from the nearby launch control room.

Musk, for his part, wished Blue Origin "Good luck!" on X.

"SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor... this is great," G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship -- its gargantuan new-generation rocket -- this week, upping the high-stakes rivalry.

Landing attempt

New Glenn follows in the steps of New Shepard, Blue Origin's first rocket, which was named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

Roughly the height of a 32-story building, New Glenn is both larger and more powerful than its smaller sibling, which is used for suborbital space tourism.

When New Glenn does fly, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first-stage booster on a drone ship named Jacklyn, in honor of Bezos's mother, stationed about 1,000km downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

Though SpaceX has long made such landings a near-routine spectacle, this will be Blue Origin's first shot at a touchdown on the high seas.

Meanwhile, the rocket's upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of roughly 19,300km above the surface.

A US Defense Department-funded prototype of an advanced spaceship called Blue Ring, which could one day explore the solar system, will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight.

Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets, but they are five times smaller and land on terra firma rather than on a ship at sea.

Physically, the gleaming white New Glenn dwarfs the 70-meter Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.

'Swiss army knife'

New Glenn is classified as a "heavy-lift launcher," capable of placing substantial payloads into low-Earth orbit. It is expected to carry up to 45 tons into orbit.

That is more than double that of SpaceX's Falcon 9, which can lift about 22 tons, though it falls short of the Falcon Heavy's 63.8-ton capacity.

However, New Glenn has a unique edge: its wider payload fairing, which can accommodate larger objects.

It "has the largest capacity to put objects in space, large objects" as a result of its wider payload fairing, Elliott Bryner, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told AFP.

Its versatility means New Glenn could become a "Swiss army knife" of rockets, capable of deploying a diverse array of payloads to both low and higher orbits.

These are set to include commercial and military satellites -- as well as Project Kuiper, Bezos's planned space internet constellation, to compete with SpaceX's Starlink.

New Glenn also has the potential to carry crewed spacecraft, noted George Nield, president of Commercial Space Technologies. "One other potential use is for commercial space stations," he added.

With the International Space Station slated for decommissioning in 2030, the race is on to develop replacements. Blue Origin is among the contenders vying to build the first privately run platform.

Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn.

For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals -- United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab -- trail far behind.

Higher tech

Under the hood, New Glenn's propulsion system represents a step up.

The first stage is powered by liquid methane, a cleaner and more efficient fuel than the kerosene used in both stages of Falcon 9.

Its second stage uses liquid hydrogen, an even cleaner and more powerful fuel, though more challenging to handle because of its cryogenic properties.

"It's the difference between driving ... a Ferrari or a Volkswagen," William Anderson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, told AFP, comparing the technology behind New Glenn and that behind Falcon 9.

Like SpaceX's Falcon 9, New Glenn features a reusable first-stage booster -- designed for up to 25 flights -- and an expendable second stage.

But to reuse the rocket, Blue Origin first has to land it at sea.

This is no small feat: It took SpaceX six years to perfect the maneuver with Falcon 9 after its debut launch in 2010.

"Landing a rocket like this, the way they're doing it, is definitely not simple," Bryner said. "The level of technology required to do this is unbelievable."

Yet achieving reusability is crucial to reducing costs and broadening access to space, added Nield.

Slow vs. fast development

Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space.

But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, "humanity's blue origin."

He founded Blue Origin two years before Musk created SpaceX but has adopted a more cautious pace, in contrast to his rival's "fail fast, learn fast" philosophy.

If New Glenn succeeds, it will provide the US government "dissimilar redundancy" -- valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University.