Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket launch could give SpaceX competition

The building blocks of Jeff Bezos' space dream are finally ready for launch.

A new Glenn rocket built by Blue Origin, the rocket company Bezos founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, is being installed on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. As tall as a 32-story building, its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than any other rocket currently in operation.

In the pre-dawn darkness on Sunday, we may be heading into space for the first time.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Mr. New Glenn could introduce competition to the rocket business, where Elon Musk's SpaceX is a big winner. Businesses and governments have hailed SpaceX's innovations that have drastically reduced the cost of sending things into space, but are wary of relying on a company that is subject to the whims of the world's richest man. .

“SpaceX clearly dominates” the launch market for larger, heavier payloads, Harrison said. “We need strong competitors to keep the market healthy, and Blue Origin appears to be perhaps best positioned to compete with SpaceX.”

Newglen is larger than SpaceX's current flagship rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as large as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system SpaceX is currently developing.

Blue Origin is also working on a future commercial space station called Orbital Reef, NASA's lunar lander called Blue Moon, and a space tug called Blue Ring that can move satellites in Earth orbit. I'm here.

Bezos' other company, online retailer giant Amazon, also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, the Internet satellite constellation, will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network.

Bezos, the world's second richest person after Musk, also envisions a future where millions of people live and work in space, a giant cylindrical habitat that rotates to provide artificial gravity, and the relocation of polluting industries into space. He talks grandly about the future. To someday return the earth to a more primitive state.

“I know it sounds fantastical,” Bezos said in an interview at the New York Times' Dealbook Summit in December. But it's nothing fancy. ”

However, those plans and hopes cannot come true without a rocket. “That's the purpose of our orbital vehicle, New Glenn,” Bezos said.

The 21st century Space Age is often portrayed as a race of billionaires rather than a nation, but so far it is not a race at all. SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, launches a Falcon 9 rocket every few days. Founded in 2000, Blue Origin hasn't gotten anything off the ground yet.

“I think a lot of people forget that Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Harrison said.

Blue Origin created and launched a small rocket called New Shepard that moves up and down. It will pass through the edge of space at an altitude of 62 miles, but it will never reach the speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour needed to enter Earth's orbit. New Shepard's flight provided space travelers and scientific experiments, including Bezos himself, with a few minutes of zero gravity.

The powerful BE-4 engine produced by Blue Origin for New Glenn is also a proven success. Competing rocket company United Launch Alliance is using Blue Origin engines in the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which made two successful launches last year.

In 2015, Mr. Bezos announced his rocket plans with pomp and publicity, but at the time he didn't have a name.

Bezos said Blue Origin will be manufactured in a factory near NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He promised to release it by the end of 2010.

The factory appeared — a huge boxy building painted in the company's signature bright blue color — and was later named New Glenn, after John Glenn, the first American to reach Earth's orbit. The named rocket never appeared.

Blue Origin continued to postpone Rocket's debut date.

At a 2023 industry panel, Blue Origin senior vice president Jarrett Jones, who oversees New Glenn's development, said he expects New Glenn to launch “multiple times” in 2024. . During a tour of Blue Origin's factory in February 2024, he said two launches were planned by the end of the year.

The delays continued. New Glenn's debut flight, carrying two identical spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission to measure Mars' atmosphere, was scheduled to launch in October.

But in September, NASA announced that it had canceled ESCAPADE's first launch, questioning whether New Glenn would be ready in time.

Blue Origin said a prototype of its Blue Ring space tugboat would fly in its place. In early December, the entire rocket was launched towards the launch pad.

Blue Origin was still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to give it permission to launch. That finally happened on December 27th.

Later that day, Blue Origin held a launch rehearsal as the countdown clock ticked down to zero and the rocket's engines ignited, unleashing a torrent of flame and smoke. However, as intended, the rocket remained firmly fixed and the engines were shut down after 24 seconds. This is the final test to isolate and fix defects.

At 1 a.m. ET on January 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of shutting down its engines, New Glenn will fly into space. The midnight launch window will be extended to 4 a.m. because of aviation restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on large, untested rockets.

Hopefully, a late debut for New Glenn is better than none at all.

Jones said last year that he expects Blue Origin to accelerate to one launch per month in 2025 and eventually more than double that.

No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launch of a new rocket so quickly.

“That's a significant amount of money,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive officer of Blytech, a space consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. But if Blue Origin can't keep up the pace it promised, customers could also be behind schedule.

Like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Newglen aims to be partially reusable, with the booster set to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform named Jacklyn after Bezos' mother. It is designed to.

On its first flight, the booster was given the nickname “So You're Telling Me There's a Chance.”

Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, explained on social media site X: No one has ever won a reusable booster on the first try. Still, we challenge it and humbly submit with enough confidence that we will achieve it. But like I said a few weeks ago, if we don't, we'll learn and keep trying until we do. ”

Harrison said a reusable booster designed to be launched at least 25 times will help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan and Arianespace's Ariane 6 rockets have both so far only flown once before falling into the ocean.

The second stage carries the payload and heads into orbit, where it burns up upon re-entry into the atmosphere.

With several companies planning to fill the skies with large numbers of communications satellites, there appears to be more than enough business for all rocket companies for at least a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced that it had signed up to 83 launch contracts with Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace to launch more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.

Amazon later announced that it would also purchase three Falcon 9 aircraft launched by SpaceX.

Blue Origin doesn't just rely on business from Amazon. In November, it won a contract from AST SpaceMobile for several New Glenn launches. AST is building a cellular broadband network that works directly with smartphones.

The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Pentagon is also a target of Blue Origin. If successful, the flight would count as the first of two needed for the U.S. Space Force to certify the rocket as ready for installation on a national security satellite.

The ESCAPADE mission failed on the first New Glenn launch, and a later New Glenn flight could head into space in 2025 or 2026.

Blue Origin is also aiming for businesses other than rockets.

The concept of a space tug like the Blue Ring is not new, and a spacecraft that can snuggle up to another spacecraft could have several uses. A rocket launch can drop multiple satellites into a particular orbit, and space tugs can move those satellites to different destinations. Space tugs can also repair and refuel old satellites, as well as push dead space debris back into the atmosphere and dispose of it by burning it.

The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls the “Pathfinder” of its future Blue Ring spacecraft. The prototype will remain attached to New Glenn's second stage during the six-hour mission.

Several New Glenn launches will be used to land the Blue Moon lander in position to take astronauts to the moon's surface during NASA's Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. It is planned that If the incoming Trump administration revamps the Artemis program, Blue Origin's role in it could be undermined. Will it grow or decrease?

Mr. Bezos' wealth in Amazon means Blue Origin is making a long-term investment without needing immediate success.

“I think it's going to be the best business I've ever been a part of, but it's going to take time,” Bezos said at the Dealbook Summit. “Blue Origin is trying to do something really great.”