Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket for first time — achieves goal but misses landing

Blue Origin’s new flagship rocket New Glenn thundered off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday. The mission put the company’s Blue Ring Pathfinder test satellite into orbit — the main objective of the flight.

“LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first ever ascent toward the stars,” Blue Origin said on social media platform X. “New Glenn has passed the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space!” the firm posted just a few minutes later.

Speaking during the launch livestream, Blue Origin executive Ariane Cornell, said the mission had achieved its “main objective” of reaching orbit.

But she also confirmed “that we did, in fact, lose the booster,” which they were trying to land on a drone ship stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

About Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket

After delays by several years, the rocket blasted off at 2:03 am (0703 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the US state of Florida.

Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.

Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits

New Glenn is the latest in a series of big, new rockets to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s upgraded Ariane 6 and NASA’s Space Launch System or SLS, the space agency’s successor to the Saturn V for sending astronauts to the moon.

The biggest rocket of all, at approximately 400 feet (123 meters), is SpaceX’s Starship. Elon Musk said the seventh test flight of the full rocket could occur later Thursday from Texas. He hopes to repeat what he pulled off in October, catching the returning booster at the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.

New Glenn’s debut was supposed to send twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. But the space agency pulled them from last October’s planned flight when it became clear the rocket wouldn’t be ready in time.

They will still fly on a New Glenn rocket, but not until spring at the earliest. The two small spacecraft, named Escapade, are meant to study the Martian atmosphere and magnetic environment while orbiting the red planet.

Stages of New Glenn rocket’s debut flight

For this test, the satellite was expected to remain inside the second stage while circling Earth. The mission was expected to last six hours, with the second stage then placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA’s practices for minimizing space junk.

The first-stage booster missed its landing on a barge in the Atlantic minutes after liftoff so it could be recycled, but the company stressed that the No. 1 objective was for the test satellite to reach orbit.

“What a fantastic day,” Blue Origin’s launch commentator Ariane Cornell, said.

New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.

About Blue Origin

Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which honors John Glenn, is five times taller.

Blue Origin poured more than $1 billion into New Glenn’s launch site, rebuilding historic Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pad is 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the company’s control centers and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Bezos — taking part in the launch from Mission Control — declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he does not see Blue Origin in a competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator.

Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, if everything goes well, with the next one coming up this spring.

“There’s room for lots of winners” Bezos said from the rocket factory over the weekend, adding that this was 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.”