Blue Origin reschedules 1st New Glenn rocket launch

The Space Coast could welcome a big player to the launch landscape early Sunday with the debut of Kent-based Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, a two-day delay from original plans to launch overnight Thursday.

Blue Origin announced Thursday it was delaying because of bad weather in the Atlantic for a potential rocket booster recovery.

The NG-1 mission is now targeting a 1 a.m. Sunday ET (10 p.m. Saturday PT) liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36 during a launch window that runs until 4 a.m. ET (1 a.m. PT).

Similar to SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, the first stage will aim for a recovery landing downrange in the Atlantic on Blue Origin’s ship Jacklyn, named for company founder Jeff Bezos’ mother.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket
The New Glenn rocket is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station this week. This is Blue Origin’s first attempt to launch the two-stage New Glenn rocket into orbit as well as try to vertically land the first stage booster on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy first stage boosters do.

Sources: Blue Origin, NASA, SpaceX, CNN, spaceline.org (Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)

“Our key objective is to reach orbit safely. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious — but we’re going for it,” the company posted on its website.

Space Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron forecasts an 80% chance for good launch conditions, but noted that weather risk in the Atlantic for booster recovery is still forecast to be moderate to high early Sunday.

“This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” said Jarrett Jones, the company’s senior vice president for New Glenn. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”

If it launches, it would be the culmination of a long road to development for Bezos’ company as it attempts to compete with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance for lucrative national security missions.

NG-1 is the first of two required flights for the heavy-lift New Glenn to gain certification from the Space Force, after which it could be awarded missions under the National Security Space Launch program’s Phase 3 contracts, which could be from among 30 missions to be assigned over the next four years worth up to $5.6 billion.

For now, New Glenn is flying a pathfinder for its Blue Ring hardware. Blue Ring is the name for the company’s satellite deployment spacecraft designed to take customer payloads to desired final orbital destinations after deployment from New Glenn’s upper stage after launch. The pathfinder on NG-1 won’t leave the upper stage, but test out communications, in-space telemetry, tracking and command hardware, and ground-based radiometric tracking.

The rocket stages are constructed at the Blue Origin factory next door to Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex on Merritt Island.

New Glenn’s first stage is powered by seven of the company’s BE-4 engines, versions of which have already been flight proven on ULA’s new Vulcan Centaur rockets, which use two BE-4 engines.

With seven, New Glenn can produce up to 3.9 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, making it more than twice as powerful as a Falcon 9, but short of the 5.1 million pounds offered by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.

The rocket’s payload capacity, though, sets it apart from its competitors, large enough to fit three school buses. That’s because of a nearly 23-foot diameter cargo area compared to the roughly 17- to 18-foot diameter area found on Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Vulcan Centaur.

The power and space, though, means New Glenn could launch nearly 100,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit.

At 320 feet tall, New Glenn towers over the 229-foot-tall Falcon 9.

If recovered, the 189-foot-tall boosters, which are designed for up to 25 flights, will make their way back to Port Canaveral where Blue Origin brought in its own crane to handle the offload. SpaceX uses the port’s mobile harbor cranes to offload its 135-foot-tall boosters.

In addition to national security missions, Blue Origin already has several commercial and government missions lined up.

That includes launching a pair of Mars-bound satellites for NASA as well as the future launch of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander to the moon to support future Artemis missions.

It also has a contract to fly 12 missions, with an option for 15 more, to carry up hundreds of satellites for Bezos’ former company Amazon and its planned Project Kuiper internet constellation.

The company has large enough facilities at Cape Canaveral to process three New Glenn rockets at once. Blue Origin took over the lease for LC-36 in 2015, investing about $1 billion in the pad site alone. It was previously used for government launches from 1962-2005, including lunar lander Surveyor 1 in 1967 and some of the Mariner probes.

It would be the third new rocket company to launch from the Space Coast in the last three years. Astra Space sent up a pair of missions from Canaveral’s SLC-46 on the now-retired Rocket 3 while Relativity Space launched its one and only mission in 2023 for the 3D-printed Terran-1 rocket from Canaveral’s LC-16.