Blue Origin Reaches Orbit In New Glenn Inaugural Mission

Privately owned Blue Origin has achieved its goal—a decade in the making—of becoming an orbital launch player, even as it failed to recover its first-stage booster in the ambitious inaugural flight of its New Glenn rocket on its NG-1 mission. 

The 321-ft.-tall rocket took off at 2:03 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral SFS Launch Complex 36 that once served Atlas rockets in what was also the first National Security Space Launch certification flight. The rocket's seven methane-fueled BE-4s lifted the first stage from its pad and powered the rocket for about 3 min. before cutting off when the second stage separated and its two liquid-hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines powered up.

The first stage then headed to its landing site, the Jacklyn vessel, downrange of Cape Canaveral.  Three of the BE-4s reignited, before telemetry was lost. Blue Origin soon after confirmed the loss of the booster.

“I think trying to land the booster on the first mission is a little crazy of us—and it may not work. It'll certainly be icing on the cake if it does,” Blue Origin founder and owner Jeff Bezos told Aviation Week before the launch.

The BE-4 engine design has flight history: United Launch Alliance uses a pair of BE-4s on its Vulcan rockets that launched twice in 2024. One difference is that on NG-1, the rocket's engines had to relight for it to return the first stage to Earth and touch down.

The second stage made it to its final medium Earth orbit (MEO) with two burns of the BE-3U engines—a vacuum-optimized version of the engine on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital booster. During a 6-hr. flight, Blue Origin plans to test technologies related to its in-space services and hosting platform known as Blue Ring. The pathfinder is intended to validate space-to-ground communications and tracking navigation for future operational Blue Ring spacecraft in MEO. In a mid-mission update, Blue Origin said the system was receiving data and performing well.

"We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said. 

The New Glenn mission comes about five years later than Blue Origin planned and nearly a decade after it launched its first suborbital New Shepard vehicle. The company suffered setbacks with New Glenn, however, that pushed the launch opportunity to 2024. As the schedule slid, NASA in September pulled a pair of small science satellites it planned to launch toward Mars using the rocket for NG-1 with engine hot-fire testing, refurbishment and integration work still ahead.

As recently as early last month, Blue Origin was still aiming for the first fight before the end of 2024. The company finally secured its New Glenn launch license from the FAA on Dec. 27.

Earlier launch attempts in January were thwarted, first by weather, when high seas downrange of the launch site made trying to land the booster too dangerous on Jan. 12. An attempt the following day was scrubbed because ice had formed on an auxiliary power unit powering some hydraulic systems.

If the Pentagon deems the launch a success, Blue Origin can compete for National Security Space Launch missions under the Phase 3, Lane 1 program that allows selected vendors to vie for task orders.

The company has said it plans to launch 6-8 New Glenn missions this year and ramp up to higher flight rates in 2026.

Blue Origin said it has launch service business secured spanning several years from customers such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile and various telecommunications providers. The company said its planned New Glenn missions include the transport of the Blue Moon Mk. 1 cargo lander and the Mk. 2 crewed lander to the lunar surface under NASA’s Artemis program. 

"Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space," New Glenn Senior Vice President Jarrett Jones said in a statement. "We're focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates.”