Blue Origin delays New Glenn mega-rocket launch

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin postponed the inaugural launch of its first orbital rocket, New Glenn, early Monday morning after experiencing an unspecified problem with one of the vehicle’s subsystems.

While delays like this happen all the time in spaceflight, this once again calls into question the timing of the much-anticipated launch. According to Eric Berger at Ars TechnicaThe company has enough depth in the countdown that Blue Origin would need at least 48 hours to reset the rocket for launch.

In addition, conditions in the Atlantic Ocean are expected to worsen this week, and Blue Origin is trying to land the New Glenn booster on a drone ship – similar to how Elon Musk’s SpaceX often recovers the heart of its Falcon 9 rockets.

The success of New Glenn is crucial for Blue Origin as the company tries to enter a heavy market currently dominated by SpaceX. Until now, Blue Origin has been mainly focused on launching tourists and scientific experiments to sub-orbital space in its much smaller space. New Shepard rocket. New Glenn should help unlock new business for Blue Origin, which he already has contracts to deliver payloads to space with NASA, the Space Force, Amazon’s Kuiper Project, and more.

Blue Origin has been preparing to launch New Glenn for a few weeks, and finally launched the 320-foot-tall rocket at its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. on the 9th of January. At that point, the company was targeting a January 12 launch. But over the weekend, the company pushed that target date back a day to increase the chances of successfully landing the New Glenn booster.

New Glenn’s three-hour launch window began at 1AM ET on January 13. The company loaded propellant into the rocket. But it got stuck on solving the unspecified subsystem problem and pushed the launch time back several times before calling. (Berger said it had to do with ice clogging a line that helps clear gas from the rocket).

Blue Origin has he said the primary goal of New Glenn’s first launch is to “get to orbit safely,” and that anything beyond that “is the icing on the cake.” Should New Glenn reach orbit, the rocket will carry a demonstrator of its Blue Ring spacecraft, which the company wants to use as a building block for a larger space economy.