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Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, scored one of the most substantial successes in its history on Thursday: sending a rocket into orbit.
The first flight of New Glenn, the company’s first rocket powerful enough to launch satellites into space, lifted off after 2 a.m. ET from the Cape Canaveral space station in Florida. The demonstration technology aboard the rocket, called Blue Ring Pathfinder, was transported safely into orbit, making the mission a success.
But Blue Origin fell short of its bonus goal of guiding part of the New Glenn rocket, called the first stage booster, to a safe landing on a sea platform after liftoff.
This maneuver, designed to allow Blue Origin to refurbish and reuse rocket boosters – much like SpaceX does with its Falcon rockets – aims to save money and reduce the cost of launches.
When the countdown struck zero, New Glenn ignited its seven engines and took off from the launch pad. The first stage, or lowest part of the rocket, fired its engines for more than three minutes before breaking away from the upper part of New Glenn.
The first stage booster then attempted to guide itself to a precise landing aboard Jacklyn, a maritime platform that Bezos named after his mother. But as the booster was ready to fire its engines again for landing, live data from the rocket cut out and Blue Origin webcast hosts were left to guess what might have happened. The hosts later confirmed that the booster had been lost.
The recovery maneuver was an attempt to replicate what Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been doing with its rockets for a decade.
SpaceX, however, which now regularly lands its Falcon 9 rocket boosters on land and sea platforms, attempted and failed four times when it first developed the maneuver in the mid-2010s.
The rest of New Glenn’s first launch seemed to go off without a hitch. The entire mission is expected to last approximately six hours and end around 8 a.m. ET.
After separating from the first stage, the upper part of the New Glenn rocket, equipped with experimental Blue Ring technology, started its own engine and continued to propel itself into orbit.
After reaching space, the rocket discarded its payload fairing, a shell-like structure designed to protect satellites during launch. And the second stage continued to power its engines until it reached orbital speeds, which are typically above 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour), or more than 22 times the speed of sound.
The exposed Blue Ring demonstrator is expected to remain attached to New Glenn’s upper stage for the duration of the mission rather than separating from the rocket as a satellite typically would.
New Glenn’s triumphant performance could set the rocket up for an exciting year. NASA intends to use the vehicle to launch two orbiters to Mars.
Blue Origin also has a variety of commercial missions on its manifesto, including projects to help deploy Amazon’s internet satellite constellation and send space-based cellular broadband satellites for AST SpaceMobile.
The Blue Ring demonstration technology that Blue Origin is using on this mission is also a precursor to a vehicle that the company hopes will one day serve as a sort of Uber ride in space, taking satellites deeper into space. space when needed.
“Blue Ring addresses two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today: the growth of space infrastructure and the need for increased mobility in space,” according to the Blue Origin website. “The spacecraft’s ability to maneuver across multiple orbits and locations, deploy and host payloads, and perform onboard computation and communications will enable game-changing missions for a variety of customers. »
Blue Origin expects Blue Ring vehicles to be capable of carrying massive satellites, weighing up to approximately 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms).
The Blue Ring spacecraft launched Thursday is also part of an agreement Blue Origin signed with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit.