Blue Origin’s New Glenn Reaches Orbit on First Launch

It is rare that a new rocket successfully reaches orbit on its maiden launch, but that’s exactly what the Blue Origin New Glenn launch vehicle did in the early morning hours.

At 2:03 a.m. ET New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines came to life at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and launched the rocket to space.

New Glenn is a massive rocket, similar in class to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The image to the right illustrates that size in comparison to the mighty Saturn V rocket that launched America’s astronauts to the moon. At 98 m (320 ft) tall and with a 50 tonnes payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), it is taller than Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy 70 m (229.6 ft) but shorter than Starship 123 m (403.5 ft), and with less payload capacity than the Falcon Heavy, 63.8 tonnes to LEO, and Starship at and 100 – 150 tonnes.

New Glenn is also meant to be reusable with the first stage reusable up to 25 times. For this flight they did try to land the first stage on their barge ship Jacklyn, but were unsuccessful with no details as to what went awry.

In an post launch update, Blue Origin said that the second stage “is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines. The Blue Ring Pathfinder is receiving data and performing well. We lost the booster during descent.”

Dave Limp, CEO, Blue Origin said, “I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt. We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”

In 2019 Telesat had selected Blue Origin’s New Glenn to launch some if its satellites for the Lightspeed constellation, but continuing development delays of the New Glenn rocket forced Telesat to look for a new launch provider and they subsequently turned to SpaceX.

Blue Origin said in a press release that “New Glenn is foundational to advancing our customers’ critical missions as well as our own. The vehicle underpins our efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit. Future New Glenn missions will carry the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.”

For this mission New Glenn was carrying the Defense Innovation Unit DarkSky-1 demonstration payload on its Blue Ring platform which is capable of refueling, transporting, and hosting satellites.

New Glenn has three launches currently scheduled for this. Customers include NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers and others unnamed.

Watch a replay of the launch.