Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket, the company’s first SpaceX contender

Blue Origin, the rocket company Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos founded, notched one of the most substantial successes in its history on Thursday: sending a rocket to orbit.

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(CNN) — Blue Origin, the rocket company Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos founded, notched one of the most substantial successes in its history on Thursday: sending a rocket to orbit.

The debut flight of New Glenn, the company’s first rocket powerful enough to launch satellites to space, took off after 2 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Demonstration technology on board the rocket, called the Blue Ring Pathfinder, was safely carried to orbit — making the mission a success.

But Blue Origin did not reach its bonus goal of guiding part of the New Glenn rocket called the first-stage booster back to a safe landing on a seafaring platform after takeoff.

That maneuver, designed to allow Blue Origin to refurbish and reuse rocket boosters — much like SpaceX does with its Falcon rockets — is intended to save money and drive down the cost of launches.

Long-awaited flight

When the countdown clock struck zero, New Glenn lit up its seven engines and lifted off the launchpad. The first stage, or the rocket’s bottommost portion, fired its engines for more than three minutes before detaching from New Glenn’s upper portion.

The first-stage booster then attempted to guide itself back to a pinpoint landing on board Jacklyn, a seafaring platform that Bezos named for his mother. But as the booster was set to reignite its engines for touchdown, the live data from the rocket cut off and Blue Origin webcast hosts were left guessing what might have happened. The hosts later confirmed the booster was lost.

The recovery maneuver was an attempt to replicate what Elon Musk’s SpaceX has done with its rockets for a decade.

SpaceX, however, which now routinely lands its Falcon 9 rocket boosters on pads on land and at sea, tried and failed four times to accomplish the task when it first developed the maneuver in the mid-2010s.

The rest of New Glenn’s debut launch appeared to go off without a hitch. The full mission is expected to last about six hours, concluding around 8 a.m. ET.

After separating from the first stage, the upper portion of the New Glenn rocket, carrying the experimental Blue Ring technology, fired up its own engine and continued to propel itself into orbit.

After reaching space, the rocket shed its payload fairing, a shell-like structure designed to shield satellites during launch. And the second stage continued firing its engines until it reached orbital speeds — which are typically more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour), more than 22 times the speed of sound.

The exposed Blue Ring demonstrator should remain attached to New Glenn’s upper stage for the duration of the mission rather than separating from the rocket as a satellite typically would.

New Glenn’s future

The triumphant showing from New Glenn may set the rocket up for an exciting year. NASA intends to use the vehicle to launch two orbiters to Mars.

Blue Origin also has a variety of commercial missions on its manifest, including plans to help deploy Amazon’s constellation of internet satellites and send up space-based cellular broadband satellites for AST SpaceMobile.

The Blue Ring demonstration technology that Blue Origin is flying on this mission is also a precursor to a vehicle that the company hopes will one day serve as a sort of in-space Uber ride, dragging satellites deeper into space when needed.

“Blue Ring addresses two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today: Growing space infrastructure and the need for increased mobility in space,” according to Blue Origin’s website. “The spacecraft’s ability to maneuver to multiple orbits and locations, deploy and host payloads, and perform onboard computing and communications will enable groundbreaking missions for a variety of customers.”

Blue Origin expects Blue Ring vehicles to be capable of hauling massive satellites, weighing up to about 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms).

The Blue Ring spacecraft that launched Thursday is also part of a deal Blue Origin inked with the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit .

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