Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is preparing for the inaugural launch of its New Glenn rocket on Sunday, marking a major milestone in its journey to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the commercial space industry.
The towering, 30-story rocket has been in development for more than a decade and represents a multibillion-dollar investment aimed at seizing market share in satellite launches and challenging SpaceX’s Falcon 9 dominance.
New Glenn’s maiden flight, scheduled for 1 a.m. ET (0600 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, will carry the company’s first payload, the Blue Ring satellite. This maneuverable spacecraft is designed for satellite service and national security missions.
If successful, New Glenn could soon play a pivotal role in the launch of Amazon’s Kuiper broadband satellite constellation, making it a direct competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Blue Origin’s previous accomplishments include the New Shepard suborbital rocket, which has successfully launched and landed multiple times. However, the company has yet to reach orbit since its founding 25 years ago. New Glenn’s debut may change that, although success on a first try is never guaranteed in the space industry.
The rocket features major advances, including a reusable core stage, which will attempt to land the first unmanned ship shortly after liftoff, mirroring SpaceX’s pioneering technologies.
Designed to carry payloads heavier than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, New Glenn features a payload bay twice as wide and nearly twice the power. However, it still falls short of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship, which is undergoing testing and aims to expand Starlink’s satellite deployment capabilities. Blue Origin has not revealed a launch price for New Glenn, while Falcon 9 launch prices start at around $62 million.
Development of New Glenn was a complex process that spanned three CEOs and competing priorities within Blue Origin, including creating a lunar lander for NASA. In late 2023, Bezos replaced the company’s CEO with Dave Limb, a former Amazon executive, to accelerate progress and focus the company on achieving the first flight of the rocket.
Employees have noticed renewed urgency across the organization, with the entire team singularly focused on the mission.
New Glenn is entering a competitive market, having already secured major contracts from companies such as Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Canada’s Telesat and AST SpaceMobile. Its success could also position Blue Origin as a contender in the US Space Force’s multibillion-dollar national security payload procurement competition, which is expected to be decided later this year.
Sunday’s flight will be a major step in certifying those high-risk missions, underscoring the importance of this launch to Blue Origin’s future in the space industry.