Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin called off the debut launch of its New Glenn rocket early Monday because of an unspecified technical issue.
But the launch was delayed several times and the final attempt, at 3:15 a.m. was aborted.
The rocket, carrying a prototype spacecraft, remained in place, with the fuel being immediately drained of methane and liquid oxygen propellants to prevent an accident.
On Sunday evening before the launch was aborted, Bezos, said if there was a problem, “We’re going to pick ourselves up and keep going.”
Bezos spent the night at Mission Control, located at the rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, 50 miles east of Orlando.
The plan had been for the New Glenn to take off, landing its reusable first stage booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, 10 minutes after liftoff, while the second stage of the rocket continuing into orbit.
The test flight had been delayed already by rough seas which posed a risk to the floating platform in the Atlantic.
The New Glenn had been due to carry a first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable spacecraft the company hopes to sell to the Pentagon, and commercial customers, to enable them to service satellites in orbit.
Bezos: ‘Anything Could Happen’
Earlier on Sunday, Bezos, said: “The thing we’re most nervous about is the booster landing. Clearly on a first flight you could have an anomaly at any mission phase, so anything could happen.”Bezos has been hoping New Glenn will enable him to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the lucrative satellite market.
The development of New Glenn has taken decades and three Blue Origin CEOs have come and go as the company was overtaken by SpaceX, whose reusable Falcon 9 is the world’s most active rocket.
In late 2023 Bezos named Dave Limp, a veteran executive at Amazon, as CEO, in a bid to speed up New Glenn success and close the gap with SpaceX.
New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as Falcon 9 rocket and has dozens of customer launch contracts lined up worth billions of dollars.
During the night, before the launch was aborted, Blue Origin wrote on X: “We want to be clear about our objectives. This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket.”
“Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious, but we’re going for it. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.” the company added.
On Sunday, Bezos told he was “very optimistic” about Blue Origin’s future and said he was not concerned Musk would have undue influence on President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, and its space agenda.
