A little after 2 a.m. Eastern Time on January 16, 2025, a new rocket blasted off from the Cape Canaveral space station in Florida. Reaching orbit, the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket marked a milestone for a commercial space company with big ambitions.
As a space policy expert, I view the success of New Glenn as a big step forward for Blue Origin and a good sign for an ambitious and growing commercial space industry.
Step by step
Although SpaceX is perhaps the best-known commercial space company, Blue Origin is two years older. Founded in 2000 by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the company envisions a time when millions of people will live and work in space.
To advance this vision, the company is developing its own line of reusable rockets, which could improve access to space.
Blue Origin’s motto is Gradatim FerociterLatin meaning “step by step, fiercely”. Bezos explained that this reflects the company’s approach to spaceflight.
“If you’re building a flying vehicle, you can’t compromise. If you do it, it will be an illusion that it will make things faster,” Bezos said at the Pathfinder Awards in 2016.
With this step-by-step approach, it took Blue Origin 15 years to launch its first rocket. New Shepard, launched in 2015, is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space.
New Shepard is not powerful enough to reach orbit. Instead, it follows a suborbital trajectory. This means it flies to the edge of space, experiencing low gravity for just a few minutes, before returning to its launch site.
What makes the New Shepard unique is that it can carry passengers. It first did so on July 20, 2021, when it carried three people, including Bezos, into space. Since then, there have been eight crewed New Shepard flights and 21 uncrewed flights. Notably, he transported Star Trek’s William Shatner into space on October 13, 2021.
AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, file
New Shepard was not without its problems, however. In 2022, it experienced an engine failure one minute after takeoff. Without humans on board, the launch escape system activated, allowing the capsule to return safely to Earth. This landing also meant that if people had been on board, they too would have returned safely.
Expand the envelope
While Blue Origin has learned a lot from New Shepard’s flights, the company needs a more powerful rocket. Named after John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit, New Glenn is designed to be that rocket.
Blue Origin began developing New Glenn in 2013 but didn’t announce it publicly until 2016. It is made up of two sections called stages. The first stage has seven engines. Once this stage has exhausted all its fuel, the goal is for it to detach and join a barge at sea, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
At this point, all three second stage engines ignite, taking the rocket into space.
Unfortunately, during the first launch on January 16, the first stage booster was destroyed while attempting to return to the landing craft. Before the launch, company officials said they were unsure if they could recover the booster on this flight, but were going to try anyway.
Measuring more than 320 feet (98 meters), New Glenn is shorter than an Apollo-era Saturn V (363 feet or 111 m), but taller than the Space Shuttle when fully stacked (184 feet or 64m). ) and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (229 feet or 70 m). It will have twice the power of the Space Shuttle but half the power of the Saturn V.
Jurgenspacerocket/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
In addition to New Glenn, the company is developing Blue Moon, a lunar lander for a future NASA lunar mission. It is also developing Blue Ring, a space maintenance platform capable of refueling and moving satellites.
Blue Origin is also a key part of Orbital Reef, a planned commercial space station in low Earth orbit. Blue Origin has likened Orbital Reef to a “mixed-use business park” that will provide space for research, development and manufacturing in orbit.
Implications for commercial space
Blue Origin’s success in reaching New Glenn’s orbit is a significant milestone for the commercial space industry as a whole. Importantly, it will create competition for SpaceX, which some say has a near-monopoly on launch services in the United States.
Competition for launch services is a valuable thing. This incentivizes both companies to provide the best service at the lowest cost. Having multiple launch providers is also a sign of a healthy business market.
Competition also provides options for accessing space in case a company needs to ground its rocket fleet. This happened several times to SpaceX in 2024 when three of its rockets experienced problems during launch. The situation left customers with no choice but to wait for SpaceX to investigate and resolve the issues.
While New Glenn will launch uncrewed missions over the next few years, Blue Origin signed a Space Act agreement with NASA in 2023 to develop more commercial projects, including a crew vehicle.
A Blue Origin crew vehicle would give NASA more options for transporting humans to and from low Earth orbit or even the Moon.
Although this New Glenn launch took 25 years to complete, for Blue Origin it is a major accomplishment – and a necessary one if it is to “fiercely” pursue its space travel goals.