CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA (Reuters) – The American company Blue Origin, founded by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, was preparing to fire its first New Glenn rocket from Florida early on Monday, a highly anticipated launch which should allow the group to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite launch market.
Measuring 30 stories high, the partially reusable New Glenn launcher sat on the Blue Origin launch pad at the Cape Canaveral space station, ready for liftoff at 1:30 a.m. ET (06:30 GMT) after being fueled with propellants from methane and liquid oxygen.
The mission, which marks the culmination of a long-term project, will include an attempt to land the first stage of New Glenn on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, 10 minutes after liftoff, while the second stage of the rocket will continue its journey towards orbit.
“What worries us most is the landing of the booster,” Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, said in an interview with Reuters before the launch.
“It is clear that during a first flight, an anomaly can occur at any phase of the mission, so anything can happen,” he added.
In New Glenn’s cargo bay is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable spacecraft that the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.
-Getting the spacecraft into the intended orbit in a first rocket launch would be a rare feat for a space company.
“If we succeed, it will be a great success,” added Jeff Bezos. “The booster landing would be the icing on the cake.”
New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and has already garnered dozens of launch contracts, worth a total of several billion dollars.
(Joey Roulette report, French version Elena Smirnova, edited by Augustin Turpin)
