ARTA – Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, will conduct the first launch of the giant New Glenn rocket on Sunday, January 19. This moment is the company’s first big step towards Earth orbit and marks serious challenges to the industrial dominance held by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company.
born up to 30 stories, New Glenn has become Blue Origin’s main focus over the past decade. This rocket is the result of a multibillion-dollar investment to meet demand for constellation satellite launches and capture market share of SpaceX’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket.
If this first launch is successful, New Glenn will begin its mission to launch Amazon’s Kuiper broadband internet satellite constellation, which will be the main competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink network. This is expected to accelerate competition in the satellite-based Internet sector.
Blue Origin has already launched and blasted off a smaller rocket, New Shepard, into Earth’s atmosphere. However, until now, the company has never sent anything into orbit since it was founded by Bezos 25 years ago with the vision of “millions of people working and living in space.”
New Glenn is scheduled to launch at 1 a.m. Western Indonesia Time (0600 GMT) on Sunday from the Blue Origin launch pad at the Canaveral space station. The rocket will carry the company’s first satellite, the Blue Ring, designed for service and national security space missions.
year, compared to the Falcon 9 rocket, the most active rocket in the world, New Glenn has twice the propulsive force with twice the payload room diameter, allowing more satellites to be carried. However, Blue Origin has not revealed the launch price of this rocket. In comparison, the Falcon 9 launch started at around US$62 million (IDR1.01 trillion).
nevertheless, New Glenn is still in defeat in terms of power compared to SpaceX’s latest generation fully reusable rocket. The Starship was designed by Musk to expand the Starlink network in orbit and is scheduled to undergo the next test launch this month.
in: The inaugural launch of New Glenn will also be the first opportunity for this rocket to attempt to land the rocket core on a drone within minutes of launch.
-Over the years, the development of New Glenn has undergone various challenges, including the change of three CEOs and the allocation of resources for other ambitious projects such as manufacturing a lunar landing for NASA. However, in late 2023, Bezos named Dave Limp, former vice president of Amazon’s devices unit, as the new CEO to accelerate development.
ina Original: “Over the past year, the entire company has been focused on one main goal: this first launch,” said one employee.
year, in addition to competing with SpaceX, New Glenn will also face other competitors such as Vulcan, a rocket manufactured by the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
: Next Sunday’s launch is also a critical certification flight for the U.S. Space Force. If crowned, New Glenn will be qualified to deploy a national security cargo in a mission expected to win billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts this year.
ina: a new milestone for the successful launch of Blue Origin and will open a new era in global commercial space competition.
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