Cape Canaveral (AFP) – A quarter century after its founding, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is finally ready for its maiden orbital voyage with a brand new rocket the company hopes will shake up the commercial space race. Named New Glenn after legendary astronaut John Glenn, it stands 320 feet (98 meters) tall, roughly equivalent to a 32-story building, and is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in a launch window that opens at 1:00 am (0600 GMT) Monday. “Pointy end up!” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, posted on X alongside photos of the gleaming white behemoth.
With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: 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. “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. SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship — its gargantuan new-generation rocket — this week, upping the high-stakes rivalry.
Soon after launch, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first-stage booster on a drone ship named Jacklyn, in honor of Bezos’s mother, stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) 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 12,000 miles above the surface. A Defense Department-funded prototype spaceship called Blue Ring will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight. Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets — used for suborbital tourism — but they are much smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.
Physically, New Glenn dwarfs the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads. It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks.
Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink. For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals — United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab — trail far behind.
Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space. But whereas 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 in 2000 — 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 give the US government “dissimilar redundancy” — valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University.
Musk’s closeness to President-elect Donald Trump has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, especially with private astronaut Jared Isaacman — a business associate of Musk — slated to become the next NASA chief. Bezos, however, has been making his own overtures, paying respect to his former foe during a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, while Amazon has said it would donate $1 million to the inauguration committee.
© 2024 AFP
