Blue Origin Scrubs First Launch Attempt Of New Glenn

CAPE CANAVERAL—Nearly a decade after launching its first suborbital New Shepard vehicle, Blue Origin on Jan. 13 attempted orbital flight with the partly reusable New Glenn heavy-lift rocket. An undisclosed vehicle subsystem issue, however, prompted the company to scrub the launch shortly after 3 a.m. EST.

The 321-ft. booster had been fueled for a launch attempt between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. on a demonstration flight that included a touchdown of the first-stage booster on a moving barge located downrange of Cape Canaveral SFS in the Atlantic Ocean. “We don't know for sure what's going to happen,” Blue Origin founder and owner Jeff Bezos said in an interview with Aviation Week before the start of fueling for New Glenn-1 (NG-1).

“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,” he said.

For its inaugural run, Blue Origin is aiming to send the booster’s second stage and attached demonstration payload into a highly elliptical orbit ranging from 1,500-12,000 mi. above Earth and inclined 30 deg. relative to the equator. The upper stage is powered by a pair of liquid hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines, a vacuum-optimized version of the engine on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital booster.

During 6 hr. of flight, Blue Origin plans to test technologies for upcoming missions of the company’s 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.

Although New Glenn has not yet flown, the methane-fueled BE-4 engines that power its first stage do have flight history. United Launch Alliance, which uses a pair of BE-4s on its Vulcan rockets, launched twice in 2024, both times successfully.

New Glenn clusters seven BE-4s on its first stage, which, unlike Vulcan, is designed to be reused. The riskiest part of NG-1 is the BE-4 engine restart for the return to Earth and touchdown, Bezos and CEO Dave Limp said.

“It’s pretty audacious to try to land” on the first flight, Limp said. “The risk profile of the landing is higher because it's one of those places where it's very hard to simulate the environments of that hypersonic environment as it's coming back. There are a number of events that happen to make that landing successful. You really have to fly to test.”

Second-stage ignition is another area of concern, Bezos added. “It’s not easy for an engine the size of the BE-3U to do vacuum testing [on Earth] at full power. So engine ignition is a real issue.

“Even fairing separation has caught people up,” he added. “And stage separation is another thing that you can’t really test on Earth. You can do certain subsystem tests, but of all the things we’re doing [during NG-1], relighting the BE-4s in the reentry environment is probably the hardest thing to test.

“Unfortunately, on a first mission, you can have an anomaly anywhere. The way to mitigate that risk is by being ready to fly again, Bezos noted.

No matter what happens with NG-1, Blue Origin expects to launch its second New Glenn mission this spring.

The company plans to launch six to eight New Glenn missions this year and ramp up to higher flight rates in 2026. As to when Blue Origin may become profitable, Bezos said, “I don’t want to speculate on that.”