
UPDATE (1/13/2025): After briefly attempting to launch on the 14th, Blue Origin elected to delay the first launch of New Glenn until 1:00 AM on Thursday, January 16th.
UPDATE (1/13/2025): Blue Origin has announced that they will be attempting a launch between 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM on Tuesday, January 14th. Previous reports in the press about a mandatory 48-hour gap between launch attempts were incorrect. The probability of acceptable weather during the launch window is 30%.
The new year is barely a week old, and Florida’s Space Coast is tense with anticipation. The debut of a new rocket never fails to draw throngs of onlookers to Merritt Island, Cocoa Beach, Titusville, and the other charming coastal towns which surround Cape Canaveral. However, even for an area which is intimately familiar with rocketry, the impending launch feels special. While several next-generation, heavy-lift rockets have made their maiden voyages in recent years, they have all been fielded by the aerospace industry’s juggernauts: NASA, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance. In contrast, the rocket which currently stands on Space Launch Complex 36 is built by a new entrant, whose actions have often been shrouded in a veil of secrecy. After 25 years of hard work, Blue Origin is ready for its moment of truth.

Tomorrow’s launch will be the maiden voyage for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. The fully-stacked New Glenn is an imposing machine. While most launch companies gradually build experience with the demanding physics of orbital launches by developing a small rocket as their first product, Blue Origin moved directly to a vehicle which can compete with the largest rockets on the market. New Glenn stands 320 feet (98 meters) in height, just 40 feet shy of the Saturn V which sent men to the Moon 55 years ago.

New Glenn is scheduled to lift off early tomorrow morning (January 13th) at 1:00 AM EST. The launch window extends through 4:00 AM. Blue Origin is planning to broadcast the launch live on its website, and AmericaSpace will have remote cameras on site to capture high-resolution photos and videos of the event. It is worth noting that New Glenn is extremely complex and untested in flight, and it would be unreasonable to expect a perfect first mission.
Like the maiden voyages of NASA’s SLS and SpaceX’s Starship, the launch could easily be scrubbed due to difficulties with loading cryogenic propellant. Once the rocket is released from its launch pad, it will need to complete several difficult milestones to reach orbit. This will be Blue Origin’s first attempt to ignite a cluster of seven BE-4 engines simultaneously, to light the engines of a rocket’s second stage in midair, and to land a rocket on a floating platform.

Regardless of what happens tomorrow, it will signify the beginning of Blue Origin’s transformation from a research and development lab to a major player in the launch industry. It is the culmination of a long and winding journey for the 25-year-old company. Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a lifelong supporter of space exploration. He grew up reading books by the space settlement visionary Gerard O’Neill and led his university’s space exploration club. Like Elon Musk, his counterpart at SpaceX, Bezos was disappointed that America willingly sacrificed its ability to explore deep space following the end of the Apollo program. With Blue Origin, he resolved to rectify this mistake by making spaceflight affordable and routine.

Bezos has a lofty long-term vision for Blue Origin. The company’s mission statement is “Building a Road to Space.” After founding Amazon, Bezos realized that the business only succeeded because organizations such as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx had established a robust infrastructure for shipping packages across long distances. Similarly, Bezos wants his company’s rockets to be affordable and reliable enough for younger entrepreneurs to start profitable businesses which focus on in-space activities.
Blue Origin also has a more altruistic vision at its core. Like many members of his generation, Bezos is disheartened by how mining operations and factories destroy the local environment. “We can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space,” he reflected following his suborbital spaceflight [1]. Ultimately, this would allow Earth to become a “garden planet” perfected for wildlife and humans, who would import most commodities from facilities on the Moon and in the asteroid belt.

Furthermore, Bezos is convinced that the planets, moons, and asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood contain the resources required to not only sustain human civilization for the indefinite future, but expand our horizons. “The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we’d have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be,” he remarked during one speech [2].
For the first three years of its existence, Blue Origin’s corporate structure was more akin to a think tank than a rocket manufacturer. It provided an outlet for Bezos and a small group of handpicked engineers to discuss their shared aspirations for settling space and to brainstorm roadmaps which would allow them to achieve that dream. Encouraged by their conclusions, Bezos decided to fund the venture in earnest in 2003.

Blue Origin’s motto is Gradatim Ferociter, a Latin phrase which can be translated to “Step by step, ferociously.” In other words, Bezos did not want his team to focus on short-term financial return or develop products in isolation; rather, he wanted to build a road to space through an intentional series of steps, with each project leading to the next. Accordingly, Blue Origin’s first projects were modest in scope. The company took its first step by building a flying rig powered by jet engines, called Charon. This was followed by a small rocket called Goddard. Both of these vehicles allowed Blue Origin to gain experience with launching and landing rockets vertically.
Instead of prioritizing orbital satellite launches, Blue Origin elected to venture into suborbital space tourism with its next rocket, New Shepard. Blue Origin’s current workhorse is capable of propelling six passengers just beyond the Kármán Line, the internationally-recognized boundary of space. For a ticket price of $1.25 million, customers can experience about five minutes of microgravity and admire the Earth through floor-to-ceiling windows before returning for a parachute-assisted landing.

Blue Origin has accomplished several noteworthy milestones with New Shepard. In 2015, it became the first company to vertically land a rocket returning from space. During the summer of 2021, Bezos and three other passengers became the first humans to ride the rocket. Since then, Blue Origin has completed eight more crewed missions. The only blemish on New Shepard’s record was the explosion of an unoccupied rocket in 2022.

Even as it worked to bring New Shepard into service, however, Blue Origin fell behind its self-declared rival, SpaceX. To date, SpaceX has launched nearly 450 Falcon rockets into orbit, and it has successfully landed 375 first-stage boosters. With a maximum speed of Mach 3, New Shepard’s performance is equivalent to a high-performance aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird. It falls far short of the Mach 25 velocity required to enter orbit – and hence access the lucrative satellite market, which generates $60 million or more per launch.

Even as it completed the development of New Shepard, Blue Origin began to secretly design a rocket which could counter the dominance of the Falcon family. It was initially nicknamed the “Very Big Brother” to the suborbital booster. Blue Origin submitted a proposal to NASA’s Commercial Crew Program alongside SpaceX and Boeing, but it lost handily due to the immature state of the concept. Piloted flights to the International Space Station were never Blue Origin’s target market, and it kept quietly improving the design.

In 2016, Blue Origin revealed New Glenn to the world. The rocket was christened in honor of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Two weeks before his passing, the legendary astronaut wrote a letter to Bezos. He remarked, “I’m deeply touched that you’ve named the second generation of (your) rockets – the first reusable rocket to orbit the Earth – the New Glenn. As the original Glenn, I can tell you I see the day coming when people will board spacecraft the same way millions of us now board jetliners. When that happens, it will be largely because of your epic achievements this year (2016)” [3].
The audacious nature of the project sent shockwaves through the spaceflight ecosystem. With a maximum payload capacity of 45 tons, New Glenn would be able to directly compete with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and the largest variants of ULA’s Vulcan. Its first stage would be powered by seven BE-4 engines, which it was already developing for ULA. At the time, New Glenn was supposed to make its debut in 2020.

Blue Origin had to build a massive amount of infrastructure to support a rocket of this scale. A new factory located adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center builds the rocket’s first and second stages. A separate factory in Huntsville, Alabama produces 42 engines per year for New Glenn and Vulcan, both of which are powered by BE-4s. Finally, Blue Origin took ownership of historic Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. The launch pad was formerly the port of departure for the Mariner, Surveyor, and Pioneer space probes, which gave us our first glimpses of the lunar surface and the inner planets. However, it fell into disrepair following the final Atlas III launch in 2005, and it had to be completely rebuilt to support the much larger New Glenn. All of this work was only possible because of Bezos, who sold roughly one billion dollars of Amazon stock per year to keep his company afloat.

Blue Origin’s factories are second to none, and most of them were completed on schedule. However, as Blue Origin’s 2020 target launch date came and went, it became clear that New Glenn itself was in trouble. Technologically, the rocket was a quantum leap beyond New Shepard, which measures just 63 feet (19 meters) in height. Unlike SpaceX’s Starship program, which accepted early failures to gather preliminary data on the rocket’s performance, Bezos wanted the first New Glenn to have a finalized design which would have a high probability of reaching orbit successfully and to be ready to compete for commercial contracts. One Blue Origin engineer placed the challenge into context when he anonymously told Ars Technica, “It’s as if NASA had gone straight from Alan Shepard to the Saturn V rocket, but then also had to make the Saturn V reusable” [4].

While delays are ubiquitous in the space industry, New Glenn’s plodding development eventually exceeded Bezos’ window of tolerance. In September of 2023, the company’s CEO, Bob Smith, formally resigned. While Bezos praised Smith in public, multiple journalists reported that he forced Smith out of his position. According to these reports, Bezos believed that Blue Origin had become too bureaucratic and had lost its sense of urgency. He replaced Smith with David Limp, an Amazon executive, and charged him with launching New Glenn by the end of 2024.

With Blue Origin’s renewed emphasis on speed and agility, signs of progress quickly became visible. As the calendar turned to 2024, the BE-4 main engine was tested in flight on ULA’s first Vulcan rocket. In May, the Blue Origin invited CBS’ “60 Minutes” film crew to take a tour of its factory. Their footage showed an impressive amount of hardware in production, including complete engine sections and tanks [5]. A “pathfinder” rocket completed a tanking test in February, demonstrating that all of the equipment at the launch pad works as intended. The culmination of the test campaign took place just after Christmas, when Blue Origin rolled out the first flightworthy New Glenn and successfully ignited all seven BE-4 engines for 24 seconds.

Beyond the raw spectacle of the upcoming launch, there is a reason why so much anticipation surrounds New Glenn. Blue Origin has all the raw ingredients required to become a successful company. It has created world-class factories and sophisticated rocket engines. It has recruited over 10,000 of America’s finest aerospace engineers, who form one of the most impressive and knowledgeable delegations at any conference. And it is led by the same people who built the world’s most dominant shipping empire. We are about to see what happens when all of these factors combine at the bleeding edge of human innovation and creativity.