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New Glenn rocket prepared for launch from Cape Canaveral

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Rocket was initially scheduled to launch at 1:00 am ET

(Adds new info in paragraph 3 on delays)

By Joey Roulette

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Jeff Bezos'

Blue Origin prepared for the inaugural launch of its New Glenn

rocket from Florida early on Monday but extended the mission

countdown to study unspecified last-minute issues, as it neared

a pivotal debut in Earth orbit to break into the satellite

launch market.

Standing 30 stories tall, the partially reusable New Glenn

launcher sat on Blue Origin's launchpad at the Cape Canaveral

Space Force Station, ready for a liftoff that was initially

scheduled for 1:00 am ET (0600 GMT) after being loaded with

methane and liquid oxygen propellants.

But late in the countdown, Blue Origin repeatedly pushed

back the liftoff time, inching closer to the end of New Glenn's

launch window at 4 am. By 2:20am, a spokeswoman on a company

live feed said mission teams were examining "a few anomalies,"

without explaining what those issues were.

The mission, the culmination of a decade-long,

multi-billion-dollar development journey, will include an

attempt to land New Glenn's first stage booster on a sea-fairing

barge in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after liftoff, while the

rocket's second stage continues toward orbit.

"The thing we're most nervous about is the booster landing,"

Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, told Reuters in a

pre-launch interview. "Clearly on a first flight you could have

an anomaly at any mission phase, so anything could happen."

Secured inside New Glenn's payload bay is the first

prototype of Blue Origin's Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable

spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and

commercial customers for national security and satellite

servicing missions.

Getting the spacecraft to its intended orbit on an inaugural

rocket launch would be a rare achievement for a space company.

"If we could do that, that would be a great success," Bezos

said. "Landing the booster would be icing on the cake."

The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin

CEOs and faced numerous delays as Elon Musk's SpaceX grew into

an industry juggernaut with its reusable Falcon 9, the world's

most active rocket.

Bezos in late 2023 moved to speed things up at Blue Origin,

prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines.

He named Dave Limp, an Amazon ( AMZN ) veteran, as CEO, who employees say

introduced a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.

New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as SpaceX's Falcon

9 rocket and has dozens of customer launch contracts

collectively worth billions of dollars lined up.