Blue Origin | Jeff Bezos’ space company is preparing to carry out the first flight of its heavy launcher

(Cape Canaveral) Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is preparing to carry out the maiden flight of its New Glenn heavy launcher in the coming days, a first which aims to consolidate its position in a space sector increasingly competitive, in particular against Elon Musk.

98 meters high, the American company’s New Glenn rocket could take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as early as 1 a.m. local time on Wednesday, according to the American aviation regulator, with another firing window on Friday.

With this flight, expected for several years and postponed several times, the company aims to catch up with its great rival SpaceX, which belongs to another American billionaire, Elon Musk.

Blue Origin has already been taking space tourists for a few minutes into space with its New Shepard rocket for several years. But it has not yet conducted any flights into orbit.

With New Glenn, much more powerful, it aims to enter a new market, that of launching heavy commercial and military satellites and sending ships to the Moon or even Mars.

This inaugural flight will represent “a major step forward for Blue Origin and for the space industry,” sector analyst Laura Forczyk told AFP.

With this large-capacity rocket, the company will “not only be able to compete with (the sending of) satellites, delivery and transport” in space, but it will also have “the capacity to launch astronauts”, details- she said.

Rivalry

The challenge is clear: to compete with SpaceX, which currently dominates the market, and to a lesser extent the American groups ULA and French Arianespace.

“SpaceX has been in recent years almost the only player” in the field of commercial and military launches, notes Scott Hubbard, former executive of the American space agency and professor at Stanford.

“So if I were still a senior manager at NASA, I would be delighted to finally have competition for the Falcon 9” from SpaceX which entered service in the early 2010s, he said.

In addition to offering American authorities the security of a backup plan, increased competition could lower launch costs, Mr. Hubbard believes.

The New Glenn rocket is partly reusable, like those of its competitor, and must be able to carry up to 45 tonnes into low orbit. This is more than double that for Falcon 9, but still less than for Falcon Heavy (63.8 tonnes), launched for the first time in 2018.

Both companies were founded in the early 2000s by the two rival Silicon Valley figures, but Blue Origin has grown at a much slower pace, partly due to a more cautious approach to design.

Once the New Glenn rocket is launched, its first stage, which propelled the whole thing, must attempt a controlled landing on a barge at sea, a delicate maneuver similar to those carried out by SpaceX.

“No one has yet successfully landed a reusable booster on the first try. However, we are going to try it, and we are humbly confident in our chances of succeeding,” David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, declared on X in September.

Six o’clock

The rocket will also carry a prototype of the Blue Ring multipurpose tug, a spacecraft intended to carry out operations in space and move satellites to their final orbits. Its technical functions will be tested during this first mission, which should last six hours, the company said.

If this launch is a success, other New Glenn flights should follow in 2025.

The company has already signed contracts with several clients, including NASA for a mission to Mars, now planned for the spring, and another manned mission to the Moon with Artemis 5 by 2030.

Blue Origin also has contracts with the American government for national security missions and with commercial players, including the Canadian company Telesat for the deployment of internet satellites.

And like SpaceX with Starlink, it should be responsible for launching some of the Amazon group’s satellites, the two entrepreneurs at their head also competing in the field, each working on the deployment of their own galaxy.

The great rapprochement between Elon Musk and future President Donald Trump also raises concerns about possible conflicts of interest and negative repercussions for the activities of Jeff Bezos.

The latter, a former pet peeve of the Republican, recently went to Florida to meet him, while Amazon announced its intention to donate a million dollars to his nomination committee.