Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Glenn rocket soars into space on maiden flight

Shrugging off bad weather, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launched its powerful New Glenn rocket on its maiden flight early Thursday, lighting up a cloudy overnight sky as it climbed away from Cape Canaveral in a high-stakes bid to compete with Elon Musk’s industry-leading SpaceX.

Like SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, the New Glenn’s first stage was designed to fly itself to a landing on a Blue Origin recovery ship after boosting the upper stage out of the lower atmosphere. Reusability is a key element in Bezos’ drive to compete with Musk on the high frontier.

The booster did it’s job propelling the upper stage out of the lower atmosphere, but during its descent to a planned landing on the recovery ship Jacklyn, named after Bezos mother, telemetry froze and there was no word from Blue Origin on what happened during the final moments of the descent.

“We may very well have lost the booster,” a company commentator said a few minutes later.

The mission got underway at 2:03 a.m. EST when the New Glenn’s seven methane-burning BE-4 engines at the base of the first stage roared to life with a rush of brilliant flame and a ground-shaking roar.

Smoothly accelerating as it consumed propellants and lost weight, the New Glenn streaked away from pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop a brilliant blue-white plume, putting on a spectacular show for cheering Blue Origin employees, area residents and tourists.

The launching came a week later than originally planned because of rough weather in the booster landing zone and once because of a minor technical problem. But it appeared to be clear sailing Thursday as the rocket climbed away and disappeared from view.

Three minutes and 10 seconds after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage engines shut down, triggering stage separation and ignition of the two hydrogen-burning BE-3U engines powering the rocket’s second stage.

As the upper stage continued the climb to orbit, the first stage briefly coasted upward before arcing over and falling back to Earth, homing in on the Jacklyn, which was standing by several hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. NASA’s WB-57 photo-reconnaissance jet was flying nearby, documenting the flight with high-resolution cameras.

Three engines re-ignited as planned to slow the booster down for re-entry, but during the burn, video showing one of the engines froze and on-screen telemetry stopped while showing an altitude of 84,226 feet and a velocity of 4,285 mph. Whether the rocket exploded or suffered some other malfunction and crashed into the sea was not immediately known.

But company officials said before launch that would learn from any anomalies and press ahead with another flight in the next few months.

“We have another one (in production), and it’ll be coming off the line here shortly,” Dave Limp, Blue Origin CEO, told CBS News earlier this week. “So we’ll fly (again) either way in the spring.

While SpaceX tested its Falcon 9 landing system with ocean splashdowns before attempting an actual landing, Blue Origin opted to make the attempt on the rocket’s maiden flight. That was based in part on the company’s experience launching and landing its sub-orbital New Shepard rocket, used to carry space tourists, researchers and payloads on brief up-and-down flights out of the lower atmosphere.

Even so, company officials acknowledged the challenge, naming the New Glenn first stage “So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance.”

“There’s no question that it’s a bit audacious to try to land it the first time,” Limp said before launch.

But the first stage landing was just one of several major objectives. The primary goal of the flight was to put the upper stage into orbit, along with a Blue Origin-designed spacecraft known as the Blue Ring Pathfinder. A sort of space tug, the Blue Ring can host or deploy multiple satellites in different orbits while providing on-board computer support and even servicing.

For its initial flight, the Blue Ring was to remain attached to the New Glenn’s upper stage throughout the planned five-hour 50-minute mission.

The flight plan called for two firings of the upper stage engines, with the second coming about an hour after liftoff, to put the vehicle and the attached Blue Ring Pathfinder in an elliptical orbit with a high point of about 12,000 miles and a low point of around 1,500 miles.

Blue Ring is equipped with roll-out solar arrays stretching 144 feet, it features 13 ports for hosted and deployable payloads and can accommodate satellites or other instruments weighing up to 2.5 tons on its upper deck.

There are no such payloads on the initial flight, but the spacecraft’s systems will undergo a series of tests to learn more about how the craft performs in space.

Regardless of the results of Thursday’s mission, Blue Origin will face an uphill battle with SpaceX, which currently dominates the commercial launch market.

SpaceX began launching its Falcon 9 rockets in 2010 and since then has fired off 436 Falcon 9-family missions with only two in-flight failures.

Complicating the picture for Blue Origin, SpaceX is in the process of testing a gargantuan, fully reusable rocket known as the Super Heavy-Starship. It is the most powerful rocket ever built, and once operational it is expected to play a major role in launching payloads to low-earth orbit, the moon and beyond.

SpaceX plans to launch a Super Heavy-Starship from the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, manufacturing and test center on Thursday at 5 p.m. EST.

After boosting the Starship out of the lower atmosphere, the Super Heavy booster will fly back to its launch pad where giant mechanical arms will attempt to pluck it out of mid air. The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, will loop around the planet, launching 10 mockup Starlink satellites before a simulated landing in the Indian Ocean.

Some 225 Falcon 9 flights have launched 7,700 Starlink internet satellites since 2019 with thousands more planned. The company already has millions of customers around the world, giving it a formidable head start over potential competitors.

How Blue Origin and other rocket builders will complete with SpaceX, it’s Falcon-family rockets and the Super Heavy-Starship remains to be seen.

But Blue Origin already has a backlog of satellites awaiting launch on its New Glenn and is awaiting certification to launch high-priority national security payloads, NASA probes and other civilian satellites.

Amazon plans to launch more than 3,232 broadband relay stations known as Project Kuiper to provide space-based internet services in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink.

Blue Origin says it has booked 80 launches using New Glenn rockets and boosters provided by the European consortium Arianespace, United Launch Alliance and even SpaceX to get the data relay stations into orbit.

“I’m very bullish about space in general,” Limp said. “I think there’s going to be lots of winners in this segment. It might be SpaceX, I think Blue will be there. But I also believe there’s going to be new companies that we’ve never even heard of yet. There’s some entrepreneur out there that hasn’t started a space company that’s going to be at the table.”

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