A powerful potential challenger to SpaceX’s rocket dominance is poised to launch

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — Nearly a quarter century after Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin, the rocket company is poised for its most defining moment to date: sending a vehicle to orbit for the first time.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is set to make its inaugural launch attempt as soon as 1 a.m. ET Sunday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A live stream of the mission is slated to kick off about an hour before liftoff on Blue Origin’s YouTube channel and its website, the company said via email.

The roughly 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn is not only the first Blue Origin rocket designed to be capable of hauling satellites to space, it’s also among the most powerful in the world. Categorized as a heavy-lift launch vehicle, it packs more than twice the power that SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket gives off during takeoff.

The uncrewed New Glenn mission will carry Blue Origin-made demonstration technology, called the Blue Ring Pathfinder, to orbit.

If successful, New Glenn’s launch debut could position Blue Origin to better compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX — which has long dominated the commercial launch sector.

What to watch for

If all goes according to plan, the New Glenn rocket will fire up seven BE-4 engines at the base of its first-stage rocket booster, which is the largest part of the vehicle that gives the first burst of power at liftoff.

A few minutes into flight, after burning through most of its fuel, the booster will detach from the upper portion of the rocket, which includes the vehicle’s nose cone, or payload fairing, that’s designed to shield cargo during liftoff.

The booster will then use fins and strakes — or winglike attachments that flare out from its top and base, respectively — to help guide itself toward its landing target, a seafaring recovery platform named Jacklyn after Bezos’ mother.

Just before touching down on the platform, the booster will reignite some of its engines and deploy six massive legs to stand on.

The landing maneuver, designed to allow Blue Origin to refurbish and reuse rocket boosters— much like SpaceX does with its Falcon rockets — is an attempt to save money and drive down the cost of launches.

Meanwhile, the upper portion of New Glenn, carrying the Blue Ring Pathfinder experiment, will continue toward the cosmos.

Two engines, optimized to function in the vacuum of space, should fire up and propel the vehicle to speeds necessary to enter orbit — typically around 17,500 miles per hour, or nearly 23 times the speed of sound.

For this flight, Blue Origin said it will not deploy a satellite into orbit. Rather, the Blue Ring Pathfinder payload is expected to remain attached to the rocket’s upper stage for the duration of the six-hour mission.

What’s at stake

Success is not guaranteed.

At any point during the flight, New Glenn could encounter a mission-ending failure. So far, the company has only ignited all seven BE-4 engines at the base of this rocket for 24 seconds during a ground test in late December.

For this flight, the engines must fire for at least several times that duration as New Glenn attempts to defy Earth’s gravitational pull.

If something goes wrong, and New Glenn begins to fly off its intended course, the company may be forced to implement a self-destruct feature — blowing the rocket to smithereens so it will not pose a threat to people or property.

Blue Origin could also see success on its primary mission: safely getting the rocket’s second stage and Blue Ring Pathfinder technology into its intended orbit. But even if that objective goes to plan, the company may still fail to land its New Glenn rocket booster on the Jacklyn platform after launch.

Failure to safely land the rocket booster, however, would not make the mission unsuccessful: Recovering rocket parts for reuse is a feat aimed solely at saving Blue Origin money. Most rocket builders, apart from SpaceX, discard that portion of the rocket after launch anyway.

If and when New Glenn proves it can get the job done, the vehicle is likely to make a big splash in the launch market, said Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space, which provides data and analysis about the space sector.

“They are postured so that they can come in and try to fill this role of being the next great, reliable launch provider for the industry,” Henry said.

The New Glenn is a heavy-lift vehicle, Henry noted, and vehicles of its size and power have “grown in importance over the years.”

Roughly a decade ago, rocket companies anticipated that small, lightweight rockets would become the next launch phenomenon because they would be capable of rapidly launching satellites intended to flesh out a string of megaconstellations — or networks of small satellites — in low-Earth orbit.

“But two things happened,” Henry said. “First is that none of the constellation (operators) went to small rockets. They all went to the medium- or heavy-lift because getting more up in a single mission is faster and more economical than doing this one or two satellites at a time. And then the second is those satellites themselves got bigger.”

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