Kent-based Blue Origin’s unmanned New Glenn rocket safely reached its intended orbit during its first launch on Thursday, Jan. 16 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines ignited at 2:03 a.m. EST from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral and accomplished the company’s primary objective to reach orbit, according to a Jan. 16 email from Blue Origin.
The second stage is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines. The Blue Ring Pathfinder is receiving data and performing well, according to the company. Blue Origin lost the rocket’s booster during descent.
“I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp. “We knew landing our booster. …on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today (Jan. 16) and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”
New Glenn is foundational to advancing Blue Origin’s customers’ critical missions as well its own, according to the company. The vehicle underpins its efforts to establish sustained human presence on the moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit.
Future New Glenn missions will carry the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, according to Blue Origin.
The program has several vehicles in production and multiple years of orders. Customers include NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers, among others. Blue Origin is certifying New Glenn with the U.S. Space Force for the National Security Space Launch program to meet emerging national security objectives.
“Today (Jan. 16) marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space,” said Jarrett Jones, New Glenn senior vice president. “We’re focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates. My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Blue Origin for the tremendous amount of work in making today’s success possible, and to our customers and the space community for their continuous support. We felt that immensely today.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also is the founder of Blue Origin, which opened in Kent in 2000. The companies are operated separately.
Blue Origin called off two other launches earlier in the week, one for a technical glitch and the other due to bad weather.
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