Blue Origin’s New Glenn Makes Orbit For the First Time

After nearly a quarter century of work, Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket made it to orbit and delivered a payload on its first try. 

Congratulations! 

🇺🇸BLUE ORIGIN JOINS THE BIG LEAGUES WITH ORBITAL ROCKET—US DOMINATES SPACE RACE

After years of development, Blue Origin has finally launched an orbital-class rocket, joining SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Firefly, and Stoke Space in America’s growing private space fleet.

With China as the… https://t.co/iZh6EkFonJ pic.twitter.com/NAZbCO7QBu

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 16, 2025

Bezos now joins Elon Musk as, if not a Master of the Universe, one of the only private individuals to compete with entire nations in getting to orbit. Bezos has joined the ranks of NASA, Russia, The European Space Agency, China, India, and Japan as a potential launch powerhouse. 

NEWS: Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has just successfully lifted off for the first time. pic.twitter.com/Gfzz4wNr0F

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) January 16, 2025

New Glenn is a massive heavy-lift rocket built to launch up to 45 tons of cargo into space, putting it in between the capacity of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. ULA’s Space Launch System, which is currently in a class by itself both in terms of payload capacity and ridiculous expense at $2 billion a launch, can put up 95 metric tons. 

To put that into perspective, depending on configuration, the Falcon Heavy costs between $90 million and $150 million per launch with about 2/3rds the payload capacity, although it is not configured to carry small space stations or go to the moon. Starship, though, could when it is ready. 

Observers typically compare Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin to each other, both because they are the largest private space launch companies and because they are the brainchild of billionaires, but they occupy largely separate categories both in approach and capacity. 

Blue Origin, despite making a few suborbital tourist flights, cannot put anything into orbit and its previous launches were basically a tourist attraction. New Glenn’s launch last night was its first attempt to get to orbit and the first time a private space company achieved that on its first attempt. 

SpaceX, on the other hand, is a profitable concern that is the largest launch provider in the world, putting up over 80% of the mass going into space and it launched almost 140 times last year. And, of course, SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest rocket to ever exist–and the first fully reusable 2-stage rocket. 

Starship is on track, more or less, to developing and deploying Starship in about 1/4 the time it took for Blue Origin to develop New Glenn. 

This gets us to the other significant difference between the companies: SpaceX uses the technology company-inspired method of building and breaking things to develop its rockets at breakneck speeds, while Blue Origin has followed the more traditional path of meticulously getting everything “right” the first time–sort of the ULA or Boeing approach to development. 

That’s why New Glenn took so long to get off the ground, although, unlike Boeing, it mostly works. 

Blue Origin hoped to duplicate SpaceX’s achievement on landing and reusing the first stage of New Glenn but failed to accomplish this task. While that is hardly a failure in itself–it took SpaceX multiple tries to achieve this goal–the reason is a bit worrisome. Mission control lost communications with the first stage while it was still in space rather than because it was unable to safely land on the drone ship. 

I say this is worrisome because a telemetry failure suggests a hardware problem, while a failure to stick the landing would more likely mean that software needs to be tweaked. 

The second job for New Glenn’s first stage—landing on a barge named Jacklyn after Bezos’s mother—did not go as well. Telemetry from the booster froze after it began its reentry burn, with the last figures putting it at 4,285mph and an 84,226-foot altitude.

New Glenn’s night launch apparently made for some impressive viewing. (Credit: Gregg Newton/Getty Images)

Launch commentator Ariane Cornell, vice president of Blue Origin’s in-space systems business unit, confirmed the loss of the booster on a livestream after the second-stage cutoff. The company’s announcement of the launch quoted CEO Dave Limp saying “We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring.”

Sticking the booster’s landing on a first attempt would have been even less likely than reaching orbit without a practice run. SpaceX needed three tries to land a Falcon 9 booster after four years of successful launches, although it has since made powered touchdowns a routine end to hundreds of launches. 

Two frustrations: Blue Origin is known for being pretty closed-mouthed about everything, and that tradition continued during the runup to and lauch of New Glenn. 

SpaceX is masterful about broadcasting everything, producing insane videos, live streams from the outside of the rocket as it lauches, races through space, and touches down. Blue Origin is, shall we say, not masterful in these things. You will notice the relative dearth of spectacular videos of the event. 

In fact, our photo library which gets updated all the time, doesn’t even include any photos of the launch or even the New Glenn on the launchpad. The hype, except among true spaceflight fanatics, is near nil. 

And–this is not Blue Origin’s fault, but still significant from a PR point of view–the launch was later than 2:30 in the morning. Relatively few people were watching live, and when you want to generate excitement, that is not ideal. 

It’s an open question whether there is a large enough market to make New Glenn a profitable enterprise. Like SpaceX, it has a built-in customer due to Amazon’s need to launch a massive number of satellites to build a space-based internet service. 

Unlike SpaceX, it doesn’t have a modest-sized rocket to provide the profitable number of bread-and-butter launches that provide a steady flow of revenue. SpaceX has only launched 11 Falcon Heavy rockets in 6 years, so the pace of such launches is not what you would call breakneck. 

We’ll have to see whether a bigger heavy lift market develops. 

Yet, with all these uncertainties, it’s good to see that private spaceflight companies are expanding and that the US remains well ahead of its competitors in space-based achievements. I wouldn’t bet the farm that Blue Origin will rival SpaceX any time soon, but with the backing of Bezos it will surely survive if not prosper.