After a postponement on Sunday due to weather, Blue Origin canceled the inaugural flight of its giant New Glenn rocket on Monday in the final moments of the countdown. Unspecified technical problems were mentioned by Jeff Bezos’ company.
The American company Blue Origin, founded by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, canceled the launch of its New Glenn rocket after “a few anomalies” during the mission’s countdown on Monday, postponing an attempt by at least a day. inaugural to reach orbit and compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch market.
The launcher was placed on the Blue Origin launch pad at the Cape Canaveral space station, ready for takeoff initially scheduled for 1 a.m. Florida time (7 a.m. in Switzerland), after having been fueled with methane propellants and liquid oxygen.
But in the final moments of the countdown, Blue Origin repeatedly pushed back the liftoff time, moving closer to the end of New Glenn’s launch window at 4 a.m. in Florida. “We are abandoning the launch attempt to resolve a vehicle subsystem problem that would take us beyond our firing window,” Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin executive, said during a live broadcast to which assisted hundreds of thousands of people.
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Social networks.
Accept More info
“We are exploring options for our next launch attempt”: a delay that could be at least 24 hours, but will likely last longer as the company considers the issue for this high-risk, high-stakes mission .
The day before, the inaugural flight had been postponed due to bad weather conditions.
>> Lire : The maiden flight of Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket must be postponed
Orbit objective
This rocket – which took years to design and whose launch has already been postponed multiple times – measures 98 meters, the size of a building of around thirty floors (read box). Its objective is clear: “Reach orbit. Anything beyond is a bonus,” boasted David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin.
Although the company has already been taking tourists for a few minutes into space for years using its smaller New Shepard rocket, it has not yet conducted any flights into orbit.
With New Glenn, Blue Origin aims to catch up with its great rival SpaceX, which belongs to another American billionaire, Elon Musk. The latter had also wished “good luck” to Blue Origin on the social network X.
The Tesla boss’s company has dominated the commercial space market for years with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and is now developing the largest rocket ever created: Starship.
Coincidence or not with the calendar, SpaceX intends to conduct the seventh test flight of its mega-rocket later in the week.
>> Lire : SpaceX’s giant rocket, Starship’s third test flight, was ‘lost’
“Having a choice”
With New Glenn, which is a “heavy launcher”, Blue Origin – since its creation in 2000 – would like to compete with SpaceX on its field: the launch of commercial and military satellites into orbit, but also ships and astronauts.
“It’s a good thing to have competition, to have choice,” insists George Nield, president of a company promoting private space activities. “This is very important for the commercial space industry, but also for the government and NASA” because it not only lowers costs, but also offers a plan B “in the event of a problem with a device,” he said.
Blue Origin has already signed contracts with several customers, including the US space agency for an unmanned mission to Mars, and the US government for national security missions.
On the commercial side, it plans to deploy internet satellites for several companies. It should also, like SpaceX with Starlink, be responsible for launching satellites from the Amazon group. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the two richest men in the world, are also fighting in the field of satellite internet.
>> Lire : Faced with Elon Musk, the EU launches its Iris² satellite constellation project et Amazon launches its first internet satellites from space
“Much lower price”
The similarities between the two private space giants do not stop there. Like the Falcon 9, New Glenn is designed to be partly reusable. During this inaugural mission, which was to last approximately six hours, Blue Origin intended to attempt to recover the first stage of its rocket.
The company has already managed to land its New Shepard rocket in Texas. But this time, it intended to attempt a controlled landing on a barge at sea, a maneuver similar to that achieved by SpaceX with its Falcon 9 rocket. “An extremely complicated process,” according to Elliott Bryner, professor at Embry Aeronautical University -Riddle.
But while the race for the privatization and militarization of space is in full swing, this process which allows “reusing large parts of rockets” is crucial because it allows both “to offer access to space at a much lower price” and to accelerate the pace of launches, he points out.
sjaq and agencies
