Blue Origin delays launch of New Glenn mega-rocket

Date:

Share post:


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.



Source link

Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden is a news writer for LinkDaddy News. She writes health, sport, tech, and more. Some of her favorite topics include the latest trends in fitness and wellness, the best ways to use technology to improve your life, and the latest developments in medical research.

Recent posts

Related articles

Photo calorie app Cal AI, downloaded over a million times, was built by two teenagers

In a world filled with “vibe coding,” Zach Yadegari, teen founder of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old-fashioned...

VC Aileen Lee highlights how the broader investor exodus is worsening woes for unicorn companies

In this week’s episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, veteran VC Aileen Lee was direct about a...

Joby Aviation and Virgin Atlantic partner to launch electric air taxis in the UK

Joby Aviation is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to launch electric air taxis in the U.K., marking the...

Amazon’s Echo will send all voice recordings to the cloud, starting March 28

Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa requests locally, which means...

Bluesky users debate plans around user data and AI training

Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to...

Week in Review: SXSW week comes to a close

Welcome back to Week in Review! I’m Karyne Levy, TechCrunch’s deputy managing editor, and I’ll be writing...

SpaceX launches astronauts for long-awaited International Space Station crew swap

SpaceX successfully launched four people into space on Friday, beginning a mission that will give the International...

Skype is shutting down in May — these are the best alternatives

After 23 years of connecting people around the world, Skype, the popular video-calling service, is shutting down....