Blue Origin scores breakthrough as New Glenn rocket completes 2nd successful flight
Rocket lifts off smoothly from Cape Canaveral and returns its booster to a platform at sea, a key step as company works to compete with Musk's SpaceX
Blue Origin launches NASA’s EscaPADE Satellites from Cape Canaveral
ISTANBUL
Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin made a big breakthrough Thursday after its New Glenn rocket launched successfully and its booster safely landed on a platform at sea in a significant technological step forward for the firm.
The more than 320-foot (98-meter) tall rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida on Thursday afternoon, completing a smooth stage separation. The launch is an important step for Blue Origin as it tries to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which dominates the launch industry and has already carried out 11 test flights of its much larger Starship rocket.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, is a major upgrade from the company’s earlier rockets. While the smaller New Shepard rocket relied on one engine to take wealthy tourists on brief suborbital trips, New Glenn is built to haul heavy payloads like satellites, and NASA missions and can be flown at least 25 times.
New Glenn’s first flight in January reached orbit but failed its attempted booster landing. On its second mission, the rocket carried two NASA probes bound for Mars to study the planet’s magnetic fields.
Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who is also an aerospace analyst, told The Washington Post that “the fact that (Blue Origin) has graduated to a paying customer does demonstrate a level of comfort with the New Glenn vehicle, even though it’s just the second launch.”
SpaceX’s Starship has flown 11 test missions, including deploying dummy satellites, but five ended in failure, some of which involved explosions. After New Glenn’s second smooth launch, Swope said that Blue Origin can start making the case that its rocket is proving more reliable, unlike Starship, which is still far from consistent.
Thursday’s launch followed two earlier scrubs — one on Sunday due to lightning-risk cloud cover, and another on Wednesday because of intense solar activity.
