Blue Origin Successfully Launches Its Spacex Rival

The billionaire abstraction title entered a caller style coming erstwhile Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin successfully launched its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket into abstraction from Cape Canaveral successful Florida.

At 2:03AM ET connected Thursday morning, New Glenn’s 7 reusable BE-4 engines ignited to propel nan NG-1 rocket into space, pinch nan 2nd style and payload reaching mean Earth orbit to execute Blue Origin’s superior ngo goal.

In parallel, nan first style booster — dubbed, “So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance” — autonomously descended to its landing level located respective 100 miles downrange successful nan Atlantic. As it approached nan Jacklyn barge, nan booster mislaid relationship pinch powerfulness and stopped sending data. Blue Origin confirmed that nan booster was mislaid during landing.

Blue Origin’s extremity for today’s uncrewed motorboat was for New Glenn to scope orbit. Anything beyond that would beryllium a prize — for illustration activating a prototype of nan Blue Ring Pathfinder payload conveyance aliases landing nan reusable booster. “No matter what, we will study a lot,” said Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp ahead of today’s launch. 

The motorboat comes aft almost a decade of betterment and puts Elon Musk’s SpaceX connected notice. New Glenn has astir nan aforesaid carrying capacity arsenic SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, and is meant to shuttle cargo into abstraction connected nan reusable motorboat platform. This includes satellites for Blue Origin’s rival to Starlink’s constellation of high-speed low-latency nett service. The first of these 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites are expected to motorboat into debased Earth orbit soon, aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket earlier New Glenn tin return complete nan dense lifting.