In the continuing saga of billionaires and big rockets comes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with his latest space vehicle, New Glenn.
The rocket, which stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, is named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first person to orbit Earth in 1962. Though much shorter than SpaceX's towering Starship, it is about the size of NASA's mega moon rocket, the Space Launch System.
Years in the making, the commercial rocket is on the verge of its maiden flight.
On Friday, while strapped firmly to its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, New Glenn nailed its final dress rehearsal, firing all seven of its engines for 24 seconds. It was the first time Bezos' company, Blue Origin, had operated the entire stacked rocket as an integrated system. Flashes from the engines pierced through billows of steam, like cracks of lightning amid storm clouds.
"Next stop launch," said Bezos in a post on X, the social media platform owned by his space launch competitor, Elon Musk. Despite their rivalry, Musk replied with a wish for godspeed.
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A video of the test, called a hot fire, can be watched in the above post. The demonstration involved a complete fueling and practice countdown. New Glenn's booster runs on methane and liquid oxygen, while the second stage of the rocket, which propels a spacecraft further into space, runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
When all seven booster engines are firing in concert, they produce enough horsepower for two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at full tilt, said David Limp, Blue Origin's CEO. For 13 seconds of the hot fire test, New Glenn was operating at 100 percent of its thrust capacity.
Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000, but its first small rocket, New Shepard, has primarily focused on space tourism, providing short flights for wealthy passengers to the cusp of space and back.
But the company has aspirations to do much more. It's building a lunar lander for NASA, to be named Blue Moon, that will perform several uncrewed test flights with the New Glenn rocket, before ferrying Artemis V astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.
It's also building a commercial space station, dubbed Orbital Reef. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $130 million contract to build it as the U.S. space agency tries to transition to a new model of space research, wherein businesses own and operate space labs in low-Earth orbit and NASA becomes one of their many customers.
Just prior to Friday's test, the Federal Aviation Administration issued Blue Origin a launch license for New Glenn, its final administrative approval. Though the company hasn't yet announced when it will attempt a liftoff, an FAA operational advisory indicates a tentative plan of a launch window opening at 11:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 31, with a backup window at the same time on New Year's Day.
"Well, all we have left to do is mate our encapsulated payload…and then LAUNCH!" Limp said on X. "Congrats to the many Blue folks on today's test."
The license allows Blue Origin to launch New Glenn from the Space Force station at Cape Canaveral, as well as land its reusable booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. That sea-based landing platform, named Jacklyn, is one of the largest remotely operated vessels in the world. The company hopes to be able to reuse a single booster at least 25 times. Reusability is an important facet of the burgeoning commercial space industry, significantly lowering the cost per launch.
Blue Origin wanted to get to this point months ago. The inaugural flight was slated for October, which would have included two Mars orbiters built by Rocket Lab for NASA. Had New Glenn launched then, the twin spacecraft would have taken advantage of the planetary alignment that shortens the travel time to the Red Planet, an average of 140 million miles away from Earth.
NASA and Blue Origin are now in talks for a potential launch for that mission, known as Escapade, no earlier than spring 2025.
