The American space company Blue Origin launched its large New Glenn rocket for the first time on Thursday. This inaugural flight looks like a turning point for the company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who intends to catch up with his rival SpaceX.
98 meters high, the size of a building of around 30 floors, New Glenn successfully took off around 2:03 a.m. local time (8:03 a.m. in Switzerland) from the Cape Canaveral space base in Florida. The maiden flight of this powerful rocket, partly reusable, had been awaited for years and had been postponed several times.
The mission has achieved its “main objective”, namely putting the second stage of the rocket into orbit, announced Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin executive during a live broadcast. This was the company’s ambition. “We did it!”, rejoiced its CEO David Limp on X. “Anything that goes beyond that is a bonus,” he said before the launch.
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After tourist flights
If the company has already been taking tourists for a few minutes into space with its New Shepard rocket for several years, it has not yet carried out any orbital flight.
Multi-billionaire Elon Musk, boss of the company SpaceX which currently dominates the market with its Falcon9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, was quick to greet his rival Jeff Bezos. “Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Elon Musk posted on his X platform.
The two Silicon Valley figures each founded their space companies in the early 2000s, but Blue Origin has progressed at a much slower pace than SpaceX, in part because of a more cautious approach to design.
With his new New Glenn rocket, much more powerful, Jeff Bezos, however, aims to enter the new market of launching commercial and military satellites into orbit as well as spaceships and astronauts, and thus compete with SpaceX.
-However, Elon Musk’s company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever designed, Starship, which, by coincidence or not, is due to carry out a seventh test flight later on Thursday.
Partly reusable
Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the New Glenn rocket was designed to be partly reusable, a specificity that would allow the company not only to reduce costs but also to have a higher flight rate.
The rocket’s reusable first stage was supposed to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the second stage, but it failed to do so.
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After this success, other New Glenn flights are expected to follow in 2025. Blue Origin has already signed contracts with several clients, including the American space agency for an unmanned mission to Mars, and the American government for security missions. national.
New Glenn is expected to continue a series of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network, which will rival SpaceX’s Starlink service.
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