The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.
A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.
In the predawn darkness today, it may head to space for the first time.
“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.
New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.
“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”
New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing.
Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon and a space tug called Blue Ring — a vehicle that could move satellites around in Earth orbit.
Bezos’ other company — the behemoth online retailer Amazon — also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Bezos, the second richest person in the world after Musk, also talks grandiosely about a future where millions of people live and work in space, of immense cylindrical habitats spinning to provide artificial gravity, and of moving polluting industries into space someday to allow Earth to return to a more pristine state.
“I know that sounds fantastical,” Bezos said during an interview at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December, “so I beg the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it’s not fantastical.”
But those plans and hopes cannot get off the ground without a rocket. “That’s what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about,” Bezos said.
The 21st-century space age is often depicted as a race of billionaires rather than of nations, but so far it has not been a race at all. SpaceX, which Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put anything in orbit.
“I think a lot of people forget Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Harrison said.
Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, which goes up and down. It passes the 62-mile-high altitude regarded as the edge of space but never comes close to reaching the velocity of more than 17,000 mph needed to enter orbit around the planet. The New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Bezos, and for science experiments.
The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses Blue Origin engines for the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.