Blue Origin delays launch of New Glenn mega-rocket

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin The inauguration has been postponed Its first orbital rocket, the New Glenn, launched early Monday morning after experiencing an unspecified problem with a subsystem of the vehicle.

While such delays happen all the time in spaceflight, it once again calls into question many expected launch times. According to Eric Berger In Ars TechnicaThe company is deep enough into the countdown that Blue Origin will likely need at least 48 hours to reset the rocket for launch.

On top of that, conditions in the Atlantic Ocean are expected to worsen this week, and Blue Origin is trying to land boosters in New Glenn on a drone ship — the way Elon Musk’s SpaceX often recovers the core of its Falcon 9 rocket.

New Glen’s success is crucial for Blue Origin, as the company seeks to make inroads A heavy-lift market is currently dominated by SpaceX. So far, Blue Origin has focused primarily on launching tourists and science experiments in its much smaller sub-orbital space. New Shepard Rocket. New Glen Blue is expected to help unlock new business for Origin, which Already have the contract To deliver payloads into space with NASA, Space Force, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and more.

Blue Origin has been preparing for the New Glenn launch for weeks now, and finally rolled the 320-foot-tall rocket onto the launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. January 9. At that point, the company was targeting a January 12 launch. But over the weekend, the company pushed back that target date by a day to increase the chances of successfully landing the booster at New Glen.

New Glen’s three-hour launch window began on January 13 at 1AM ET. The company loaded the propellant into the rocket. But it got bogged down in troubleshooting unspecified subsystem problems and pushed back the launch time multiple times before shutting it down. (Berger reported that it worked with a line trapped in ice that helped funnel gas away from the rocket.)

Has blue origin said The primary goal of New Glenn’s first launch is to “reach orbit safely” and anything beyond that is “icing on the cake”. When New Glen reaches orbit, the rocket will carry a demonstrator of its Blue Ring spacecraft, which the company plans to use as a building block for a larger space-based economy.