Bezos’ Blue Origin ready for first orbital launch next week

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin is scheduled to launch its first orbital rocket next week, marking a pivotal moment in the commercial space race currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It will be.

The rocket, named New Glenn, is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1 a.m. Wednesday (06:00 GMT), according to a Federal Aviation Administration advisory, and on Friday. There will be a preliminary period.

Blue Origin has not officially announced a launch date, but excitement has been building since a successful “hot-fire” test on December 27th.

“Next time, no launches,” Bezos declared on X, sharing a video of the towering rocket’s engines roaring to life.

The NG-1 mission carried a prototype Blue Ring spacecraft, a Department of Defense-funded spacecraft envisioned as a versatile satellite deployment platform, mounted on the rocket’s second stage during a six-hour test flight. It remains as it was.

This is Blue Origin’s long-awaited entry into the lucrative orbital launch market after years of suborbital flights with its small New Shepard rockets, which quickly transport passengers and payloads to the edge of space.

“The market is really taking off,” Astralytical founder and analyst Laura Forczyk told AFP. “There’s a limit to how far you can go in suborbital. There’s a limit to the number of payloads and customers that can quickly go to space.”

space king

The milestone will also intensify the conflict between Bezos, the world’s second-richest person, and Musk, the richest man who has cemented SpaceX’s dominance and is now in President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle. .

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has become an industry workhorse, serving customers ranging from commercial satellite operators to the Department of Defense and NASA, which uses it to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. I’m doing it.

Like the Falcon 9, the New Glenn has a reusable first stage designed to land vertically on a ship at sea.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the ship, playfully named “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” reflects the challenge of landing a reusable rocket on the first try. He said he was doing it.

At 98 meters (320 feet) tall, New Glenn is smaller than the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed to carry larger and heavier payloads. It burns cleaner liquid natural gas rather than kerosene and uses fewer engines, while placing it between the Falcon 9 and its sibling the Falcon Heavy in terms of cargo capacity.

“If I were still a senior NASA executive, I would be thrilled to finally be able to compete with the Falcon 9,” G. Scott Hubbard, NASA’s former Mars emperor and now at Stanford University, told AFP. ”, he said, adding that competition is intensifying. This may help reduce launch costs.

political influence

For now, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead and commands the lion’s share of the market, with rivals like United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab far behind.

Like Musk, Bezos has an abiding passion for space. But while Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions a giant floating space colony in the solar system.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, two years before Musk founded SpaceX, but the company has progressed at a much slower pace, reflecting a more cautious approach.

“Blue Origin’s very deliberate approach has created impatience within the space community,” Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University and former member of the National Space Council, told AFP. “I’m working on it,” he said.

If successful, New Glenn would provide the U.S. government with “heterogeneous redundancy,” or alternative systems that provide backup if a system fails, Pace said.

This could prove crucial, as SpaceX plans to retire the Falcon 9 by the end of this decade in favor of a prototype Starship that relies on completely unproven technology.

Mr. Musk’s closeness to Mr. Trump has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, particularly with Mr. Musk’s business associate and private astronaut Jared Isaacman, who is slated to be NASA’s next administrator.

But Bezos made his own statement by paying tribute to his former enemy during a visit to the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, announcing that Amazon would donate $1 million to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee.

© 2025 AFP