Blue Origin New Glenn Rocket Blasts Off In Challenge To SpaceX

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Glenn rocket on Thursday safely reached its intended orbit on Thursday, in a rare achievement for an inaugural rocket launch.

Blue Origin confirmed that at 2am ET (0700 GMT) on Thursday 16 January 2025, the successful launch of the huge New Glenn rocket from it’s launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force station on Florida’s east coast.

The 320-foot rocket had initially intended to carry out its inaugural launch last Sunday, but this was delayed until Monday, when Blue Origin called off the certification flight due to reported ice that had accumulated on a propellant line.

Successful launch

New Glenn’s inaugural mission (NG-1) is the first National Security Space Launch certification flight for the giant two stage rocket, that stands 30 stories tall and is partially reusable.

The first stage booster was intended to be landed on the barge Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after liftoff, while the rocket’s second stage continued toward orbit.

Blue Origin confirmed that the “second stage is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines. The Blue Ring Pathfinder is receiving data and performing well. We lost the booster during descent.”

“I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Dave Limp, CEO, Blue Origin. “We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”

The payload for this first flight was the ‘Blue Ring Pathfinder‘ multi-space mobility platform, that can travel to multiple orbits and locations while hosting and deploying payloads.

This will test Blue Ring’s core flight, ground systems, and operational capabilities as part of the Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU) Orbital Logistics prototype effort.

SpaceX rival

The New Glenn rocket is Blue Origin’s answer to SpaceX’s heavy payload carrier rocket, Falcon 9, which so far has carried out 433 launches as of 13 January.

New Glenn is five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket that carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.

Both are named after pioneering US astronauts.

Blue Origin said the new rocket is “is foundational to advancing our customers’ critical missions as well as our own. The vehicle underpins our efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit.”

It added that future New Glenn missions will carry the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.

The program has several vehicles in production and multiple years of orders. Customers include NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers, among others.

Project Kuiper is Amazon’s long-touted broadband internet satellite constellation, that will eventually rival SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Blue Origin is also certifying New Glenn with the US Space Force for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program to meet emerging national security objectives.

“Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space,” said Jarrett Jones, Senior Vice President, New Glenn. “We’re focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates. 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.”