Credit: X / @blueorigin
Jeff Bezos has taken a major leap forward in his battle with Elon Musk to conquer space after launching his heavy New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first time.
After repeated delays and an aborted launch attempt on Monday, the Bezos rocket blasted off at just after 2am local time from Cape Canaveral in Florida as Mr Bezos watched on from the company’s mission control room.
The mission represents the first time a rocket owned by Mr Bezos’s company Blue Origin has reached orbit, more than two decades after he founded the business.
The rocket shot past the Karman line, seen as the boundary of space, to cheers and whoops from Blue Origin’s crew and staff on its live stream. “It’s time to do this, let’s light this candle,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s launch commentator, as it blasted off.
However, while the 32-story rocket launched successfully, its attempt to land its booster rocket back on Earth failed.
New Glenn’s maiden space flight was delayed by poor weather earlier in the week – AP Photo/John Raoux
Ahead of the launch, Blue Origin said: “No amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.
“We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious – but we’re going for it. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”
Mr Bezos, the founder of Amazon, hopes his rocket venture will enable humans to colonise space.
The billionaire and world’s second richest man – after Mr Musk – has spoken of his vision of “millions” of people living in off-world space stations.
Founded in 2000 in secret, Mr Bezos had a two-year headstart on Mr Musk’s SpaceX, a company that aims to take mankind to Mars, but Blue Origin has endured years of delays and setbacks in its attempt to build a launcher that can compete with Mr Musk’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket.
While Mr Musk has launched hundreds of rockets and become a crucial partner of NASA, Mr Bezos’s business has only hosted a handful of suborbital space tourism flights.
The company’s 320ft tall New Glenn rocket is intended to ferry dozens of satellites into space. Its first mission is carrying a data and communications satellite called Blue Ring.
Like Mr Musk’s SpaceX, the company’s rockets are intended to be reusable. However, its attempt to return the company’s booster stage back to Earth, by landing it on an ocean-borne barge called Jacklyn, ended with the loss of the first stage.
Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in secret in 2000 – REUTERS/Isaiah J. Downing/File Photo/File Photo
Mr Bezos has long been a space enthusiast. He is a fan of the science fiction series Star Trek, once appearing as an extra in the movie Star Trek Beyond. In 2021, he travelled to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin’s space tourism rocket, New Shepherd, on its maiden manned flight.
Blue Origin first announced its plans for its orbital New Glenn rocket in 2016, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, with a first flight planned as early as 2020. That timeline has since repeatedly slipped, however.
Mr Bezos has also lost out on multi-billion dollar contracts to SpaceX. In 2021, Blue Origin sued NASA over its decision to award a $3bn ($2.5bn) lunar lander contract to Mr Musk’s company, a case it lost. However, NASA later awarded a second lander contract to Mr Bezos’s company.
