On Thursday morning, at a time when most individuals in the US had been sleeping, Jeff Bezos’ house firm despatched its first rocket into orbit.
At 2:03 a.m. Jap time, seven highly effective engines ignited on the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night time into day at Cape Canaveral House Pressure Station in Florida. The rocket, barely shifting at first, nudged upward after which accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the colour of combustion of the rocket’s methane gasoline.
13 minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit.
The launch was a significant success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos’ rocket firm. It ought to quiet critics who say that the corporate has been too gradual in contrast with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has dominated international spaceflight trade lately. New Glenn may show a reputable competitor with Mr. Musk’s firm and win launch contracts from NASA and the Division of Protection, in addition to business contracts.
For at the least one second, nevertheless, the 2 richest folks on this planet warmly cheered one another.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the primary try!” Mr. Musk wrote on X, the social media website that he owns.
“Thanks!” Mr. Bezos replied.
Mr. Bezos posted a sequence of images and movies. “Stunning,” Mr. Musk commented on one of many photographs.
The upward flight appeared virtually flawless, however Blue Origin’s stretch purpose of touchdown the booster stage on a barge within the Atlantic Ocean failed. As deliberate, the booster fired three of its engines to decelerate, however then the stream of knowledge stopped, indicating that the booster had been misplaced.
“We’ll be taught so much from in the present day and check out once more at our subsequent launch this spring,” Dave Limp, the chief government of Blue Origin, mentioned in an announcement.
For years, Mr. Bezos has talked of an formidable imaginative and prescient of tens of millions of individuals working and dwelling in house, sending spacecraft to the moon and constructing house stations. Skeptics, nevertheless, identified that Blue Origin had not despatched a single factor to orbit because the firm was based almost a quarter-century in the past, two years earlier than SpaceX.
Now it has.
“There was motive to doubt earlier than this launch if Blue Origin really had the technical functionality,” mentioned Todd Harrison, an area coverage analyst on the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington assume tank. “And now they’ve confirmed that they do.”
Till now, Blue Origin had launched solely its smaller New Shepard rocket, which despatched house vacationers and science experiments on suborbital jaunts to the sting of house, offering a couple of minutes of floating. Mr. Bezos was among the many first passengers on a New Shepard flight in 2021.
New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the primary American to orbit Earth, dwarfs New Shepard. Certainly, a New Shepard may match inside New Glenn’s payload space within the nostril cone. Reaching the velocity to circle the Earth is a way more complicated job than the New Shepard automobile has achieved.
“The entire sudden, you’ve graduated to a brand new stage of credibility,” mentioned Phil Smith, an area trade analyst at BryceTech, a consulting agency in Alexandria, Va.
When Mr. Bezos introduced plans for the rocket, he mentioned it could be prepared by the top of 2020. An enormous Blue Origin rocket manufacturing facility rose simply outdoors NASA’s Kennedy House Middle in Florida, however there have been scant indicators of the rocket itself. The unique goal date got here and went.
Blue Origin was chosen to launch a NASA mission — ESCAPADE, which is to take measurements of the Martian environment — in October final yr. However NASA pulled the spacecraft off the inaugural flight when it turned unsure that Blue Origin may very well be prepared in time.
As a substitute, this launch took to orbit a prototype of Blue Ring, a automobile that might transfer satellites round in Earth orbit. For this flight, the prototype — Blue Origin calls it a “pathfinder” — remained hooked up to the rocket’s second stage testing the communication, energy and flight pc methods.
Blue Origin says that sooner or later Blue Ring will have the ability to transfer payloads between very completely different orbits, together with those who exit so far as the moon and carry out quite a lot of duties.
The Blue Ring prototype labored as anticipated in the course of the six-hour mission, Blue Origin mentioned.
Blue Origin nonetheless lags far behind SpaceX in accomplishments — Mr. Musk’s firm launched greater than 100 instances final yr. However New Glenn may supply long-awaited competitors for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which at the moment dominate the launch trade.
”The one remaining query, I feel, is how briskly they’ll ramp up the launch price,” Mr. Harrison mentioned.
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Limp mentioned that, with a profitable inaugural launch of New Glenn, Blue Origin is aiming for a second launch within the spring and that he needed six to eight launches this yr.
“That may be a very good yr for us, I feel,” he mentioned.
“Jeff would love us to do extra, so we’re pushing,” Mr. Limp added, referring to Mr. Bezos, who was sitting subsequent to him.
“That’s very lifelike,” Mr. Bezos mentioned.
Certainly one of Blue Origin’s contracts is with Mr. Bezos’ different firm, Amazon, to launch satellites for Venture Kuiper, a constellation of web satellites. It should compete with SpaceX’s Starlink system.
Blue Origin officers haven’t but introduced what can be going up this yr, however the launches may embrace an uncrewed moon lander. Blue Origin is engaged on a spacecraft that’s to take NASA astronauts to the floor of the moon just a few years from now.
Throughout an interview final yr on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” a Blue Origin official revealed that the corporate was growing a small lunar lander that it known as Blue Moon Mark 1, scheduled to launch to the moon in 2025.
Mr. Limp mentioned that was nonetheless the plan, and the spacecraft is at the moment underneath building.
A full-scale mannequin of the Mark 1 lander dominates the foyer of the Blue Origin constructing in Florida.
“It’s presupposed to go this yr,” Mr. Bezos mentioned. “I feel it can go this yr.”
