A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket lifts off on its inaugural launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., on January 16, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday (January 16, 2025), sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.

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. All seven main engines fired at liftoff as the rocket blazed through the predawn sky, drawing cheers from spectators lining the nearby beaches. Company employees erupted in shouts and frenzied applause once the craft successfully orbit 13 minutes later, a feat that drew quick praise from SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

Mr. 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.

He stood much of the time at his seat in Mission Control, looking anxious and happy at the same time.

“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Mr. Musk said via X.

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 more important goal was for the test satellite to reach orbit. Bezos said before the flight it was “a little crazy” to even try to land the booster on the first try.

“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.

Founded 25 years ago by Mr. 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.

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” Mr. 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.”

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. 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.

Starship is what NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. The first two moon landings under the space agency’s Artemis program, which follows the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, will see crews descending from lunar orbit to the surface in Starships.

Blue Origin’s lander, dubbed Blue Moon, will make its debut on the third lunar touchdown by astronauts.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pushed for competing moon landers similar to the strategy to hire two companies to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Nelson will step down when President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Monday.

Mr. Trump has tapped tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to run NASA. Isaacman, who has twice rocketed into orbit on his own privately financed SpaceX flights, must be approved by the Senate.

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.

Cape Canaveral:

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.
The launch initially scheduled for Sunday was pushed back a day due to “unfavourable” sea conditions, Blue Origin posted on X.

Named New Glenn after a legendary astronaut, the rocket 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 now 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, Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, is taking direct aim at the world’s wealthiest: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

These serve the commercial sector, the Pentagon, and US space agency NASA — including, crucially, ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

“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 — the very next day, upping the sense of high-stakes rivalry.

Landing attempt

If all goes to plan, shortly 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, carrying a Defense Department-funded prototype spaceship called Blue Ring, which will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight.

Limp emphasized that simply reaching orbit is the prime goal, while successfully recovering the booster would be a welcome “bonus.”

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, ideal for transporting more voluminous cargo.

Slow vs fast development

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.

“There’s been impatience within the space community over Blue Origin’s very deliberate approach,” Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University and former member of the National Space Council, told AFP.

If New Glenn succeeds, Pace added, it will give the US government “dissimilar redundancy” — valuable backup if one system fails.

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.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)