If New Glenn lifts off overnight as planned, the Amazon founder’s rocket company will be on track to give Elon Musk’s SpaceX some genuine competition.
The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.
A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the predawn darkness on Sunday, it may head to space for the first time.
“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.
“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing.
Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon and a space tug called Blue Ring — a vehicle that could move satellites around in Earth orbit.
Reusable Rockets
If successful, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket might eventually compete with SpaceX in the business of launching to space.
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320 feet
SPACEX
ROCKETS
BLUE ORIGIN
ROCKETS
New Shepard
New Glenn
Falcon 9
Falcon
Heavy
Starship
Relative size of the
Space Shuttle
320 feet
SPACEX
ROCKETS
BLUE ORIGIN
ROCKETS
New Shepard
New Glenn
Falcon 9
Falcon
Heavy
Starship
BLUE ORIGIN
ROCKETS
SPACEX
ROCKETS
320 feet
New Shepard
New Glenn
Falcon 9
Starship