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New Glenn launch to mark Blue Origin's first trek to orbit

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New Glenn would rival SpaceX's Falcon 9, Starship rockets

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U.S. Space Force eyeing the mission for future national

security

launches

By Joey Roulette

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Jeff Bezos'

Blue Origin is set for an inaugural launch of its giant New

Glenn rocket on Sunday, a long-awaited first leap to Earth orbit

that sets up one of the biggest challenges yet to industry

dominance enjoyed by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Standing 30 stories tall, New Glenn has been a core focus

for Blue Origin since the beginning of its decade-long

development, representing a multibillion-dollar effort to sate

demand for satellite constellation launches and snatch market

share from SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9.

If successful in its debut, New Glenn can later start

launching Amazon's ( AMZN ) broadband internet satellite

constellation, Kuiper, that will rival SpaceX's Starlink

network, accelerating competition on another front.

Blue Origin for years has launched and landed its much

smaller, reusable New Shepard rocket to and from the brim of

Earth's atmosphere. It has yet to send anything into orbit in

the 25 years since Bezos founded the company to have "millions

of people working and living in space."

That could change this week, but with new rockets, success

is not guaranteed.

New Glenn is scheduled to launch at 1 am ET (0600 GMT) on

Sunday from the company's launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space

Force Station, sending to orbit its first Blue Ring satellite -

a maneuverable spacecraft designed for satellite servicing and

national security missions in space.

Compared with SpaceX's Falcon 9, the world's most active

rocket, New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful with a payload

bay diameter two times larger to fit bigger batches of

satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the rocket's launch

pricing. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.

New Glenn, however, would not be as powerful as SpaceX's

next-generation Starship, a fully reusable rocket system in

development that Musk sees as crucial to expanding Starlink's

footprint in orbit. Starship in its next test flight this month

will attempt to deploy mock satellites.

'FOUND A SWEET SPOT'

There are dozens of launches and hundreds of millions of

dollars sitting on New Glenn's docket. Blue Origin has booked

multi-launch deals with Eutelsat's OneWeb, Canada's Telesat ( TSAT )

and satellite-to-cellular device company AST

SpaceMobile ( ASTS ).

"New Glenn has found a sweet spot that has enabled them to

get more customers than anyone else right now," said Caleb

Henry, a satellite and launch analyst at Quilty Analytics, of

the space company's potential in satellite constellations.

SpaceX's Falcon 9, which ignited the industry's reusability

trend for its cost savings potential, made early landing

attempts of the rocket's core stage by returning it to the ocean

during development a decade ago, before attempting touchdowns on

drone ships.

New Glenn's reusable core stage will make its first landing

attempt on a drone ship a few minutes after liftoff.

New Glenn's rocky development has spanned three CEOs and at

times slowed as Blue Origin took on other ambitious projects,

such as building a moon lander for NASA.

As much of the Western world grew reliant on SpaceX for

accessing space, Bezos in late 2023 sought to jolt New Glenn out

of development paralysis by replacing Blue Origin's CEO with

Dave Limp, a deputy from Amazon's ( AMZN ) devices unit, to speed things

up.

Blue Origin engineers have felt the urgency from the top,

according to multiple employees.

"We've never had the entire company fully focused on one

thing so aggressively like this before," one Blue Origin

employee said. "For all of the last year it's basically been

everyone's mission every day to get to this first launch."

New Glenn also would compete with the less-powerful Vulcan

rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing ( BA )

and Lockheed that is planning a stronger Vulcan

variant in the future.

The Sunday launch is also a key certification flight

required by the U.S. Space Force before New Glenn can launch

national security payloads on missions it hopes to win in a

multibillion-dollar procurement competition due for award later

this year.