Maiden flight of the “New Glenn”
Competition for Musk: Amazon founder sends new rocket into space
January 7, 2025 – 12:13 p.mReading time: 2 min.
SpaceX faces competition: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin wants to launch its “New Glenn” rocket for the first time. All details.
Five years later than planned, it is now set to take off for the first time: the “New Glenn” rocket from Blue Origin – the company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. According to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the rocket is scheduled to launch next Friday at 1 a.m. local time (7 a.m. CET) from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida (USA).
On December 27th, the rocket had already successfully completed the decisive test before its maiden flight – shortly afterwards the FAA gave it permission to take off.
On its first flight, the “New Glenn” will carry a prototype of Blue Ring, a spacecraft funded by the US Department of Defense that will launch satellites into space.
With “New Glenn”, Blue Origin has made its long-awaited entry into the lucrative market for orbital rockets. So far, the company has only carried passengers and payloads on short trips to the edge of space with its smaller New Shepard suborbital rocket.
“The market is truly orbital,” says Laura Forczyk, founder of consulting firm Astralytical. “Suborbital only gets you so far – there are only so many payloads and customers for a quick flight into space.”
The new orbital rocket will also intensify the rivalry between Musk, the world’s richest person, and Bezos, the second richest. Musk is currently the clear leader in commercial space travel with SpaceX and, as a close confidant of US President-elect Donald Trump, now also has political influence.
Commercial satellite operators as well as the Pentagon and the US space agency NASA use SpaceX’s “Falcon 9” rockets. Competitors such as United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Rocket Lab are far behind.
Like Falcon 9, New Glenn has a reusable first stage rocket designed to land upright on a ship in the ocean. With a height of 98 meters, “New Glenn” towers 28 meters higher than the “Falcon 9” and can also carry larger and heavier loads into space. It burns cleaner liquid natural gas instead of kerosene and has fewer engines.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 – two years before Musk launched SpaceX. However, Blue Origin acted with more caution and therefore developed more slowly than its competitor.
The planned first flight of “New Glenn” was originally planned for the fourth quarter of 2020 – but was repeatedly postponed. The rocket is named after John Glenn, who became the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth in a spacecraft in 1962.