Investing.com — Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company, announced that its New Glenn rocket successfully reached the planned orbit on its NG-1 mission, marking a major milestone for the company. Launch took place on 01/16/2025 at 2:03 a.m. EST from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Station.
The rocket’s second stage reached its final orbit after two successful firings of the BE-3U engines. The Blue Ring Pathfinder, part of the mission, is receiving data and functioning properly. However, the thruster, named “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance”, was lost during the descent.
Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, expressed pride in New Glenn’s success in reaching orbit on its first attempt. He acknowledged the ambitious goal of landing the booster on the first try and thanked the entire Blue Origin team for this important milestone. He also indicated that the company would attempt another launch in spring 2025.
New Glenn is critical to Blue Origin’s mission to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon, harness space resources, provide multi-mission and multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and create destinations in low Earth orbit. Future New Glenn missions plan to carry the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 manned lander to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
-The New Glenn program has several vehicles in production and several years of customer orders, including NASA, Amazon’s (NASDAQ:) Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile and several telecommunications providers. Blue Origin is also in the process of certifying New Glenn to the U.S. Space Force for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program to meet emerging national security objectives.
Jarrett Jones, senior vice president of New Glenn, said the successful orbit marked a new era for Blue Origin and commercial space. He expressed his gratitude to the Blue Origin team for their hard work, as well as to their customers and the space community for their continued support. He also said the company is focused on increasing its launch cadence and production rates.
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