Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin postponed the inaugural launch of its first orbital rocket, New Glenn, early Monday morning after experiencing an unspecified issue with one of the vehicle’s subsystems.
While delays like this happen all the time in spaceflight, this one once again puts the timing of the much-anticipated launch in question. According to Eric Berger at Ars Technica, the company got deep enough into the countdown that Blue Origin would 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 New Glenn’s booster on a drone ship — similar to how Elon Musk’s SpaceX often recovers the core of its Falcon 9 rockets.
New Glenn’s success is crucial to Blue Origin, as the company is trying to enter a heavy-lift market currently dominated by SpaceX. Up until now, Blue Origin has been primarily focused on launching tourists and science experiments to sub-orbital space in its much smaller New Shepard rocket. New Glenn is supposed to help unlock new business for Blue Origin, which already has contracts to deliver payloads to space with NASA, the Space Force, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and more.
Blue Origin has been preparing to launch New Glenn for a few weeks now, and finally rolled the 320-foot-tall rocket out to its launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida on January 9. At that point, the company was targeting a launch on January 12. But over the weekend, the company pushed that target date back one day in order to increase the odds of successfully landing New Glenn’s booster.
New Glenn’s three-hour launch window began at 1AM ET on January 13. The company loaded propellant into the rocket. But it got stuck troubleshooting the unspecified subsystem issue and pushed the launch time back multiple times before calling it off. (Berger reported that it had to do with ice clogging a line that helps vent gas away from the rocket.)
Blue Origin has said the primary goal for New Glenn’s first launch is to “reach orbit safely,” and that anything beyond that “is icing on the cake.” Should New Glenn reach orbit, the rocket will be carrying a demonstrator of its Blue Ring spacecraft, which the company wants to use as a building block for a larger space-based economy.
