Jeff Bezos is catching up a little on Elon Musk

It’s a success for the all-powerful boss of Amazon, Jeff Bezos: his space company, Blue Origin, launched its large New Glenn rocket for the first time on Thursday. This inaugural flight looks like a turning point, as the billionaire 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. “We did it!”, rejoiced his boss David Limp on , Blue Origin said in a press release.

Blue Ring is a spacecraft intended to perform operations in space and move satellites to their final orbits. 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.

Rival Greetings

Elon Musk, boss of rival company SpaceX, which currently dominates the market with its Falcon9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, was quick to greet his competitor. “Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Elon Musk posted on his X platform to Jeff Bezos. “Thank you,” replied the latter, a good sport.

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever designed, Starship, which, timing or not, is scheduled to conduct a seventh test flight later Thursday. 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.

In addition to entering orbit, Blue Origin intended to attempt during this first flight the recovery of the first stage of its rocket, the booster, by landing it in a controlled manner on a barge at sea, a complex maneuver similar to those carried out by SpaceX, which however did not get there the first time. But a few minutes after the launch, Ariane Cornell confirmed that the teams had “lost the propellant”. “You can see on this map how close he was to landing,” she continued.

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 race continues

After this success, other New Glenn flights are expected to follow in 2025. Blue Origin has already signed contracts with several clients, including the US space agency for an unmanned mission to Mars, and the US government for security missions. national. 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.

For George Nield, president of a company promoting private space activities, this launch is good news for the entire space sector, because “it’s a good thing to have competition, to have choice” . “This is very important for the commercial space industry, but also for the government and NASA” because it not only reduces costs, but also offers a plan B “in the event of a problem with a device”, he explained to AFP before the flight.(mbr/ats)

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