Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin readied the company’s powerful New Glenn rocket for its long-awaited maiden flight early Sunday, kicking off a high-stakes bid to compete head-to-head with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its industry dominating Falcon family of rockets.
While more than one successful test flight will be needed to demonstrate the reliability needed for launches of costly NASA probes, high-priority national security payloads and other commercial spacecraft, the New Glenn, 10 years after Bezos announced the project, is expected to be a viable alternative.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket atop launch complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, awaiting its maiden launch. / Credit: Blue Origin
Mounted atop pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the 321-foot-tall rocket is scheduled for blast off at 1 a.m. EST Sunday, weather permitting, the opening of a three-hour window.
Like SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, the first stage of the New Glenn, powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines generating a combined 3.8 million pounds of thrust, was designed to be reusable.
After boosting the rocket’s upper stage out of the lower atmosphere three minutes and 10 seconds after launch, the 188-foot-tall first stage will separate and attempt to land on a 380-foot-long custom-built ship named after Bezos’ mother, Jacklyn, that will be stationed downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
Rough seas prompted Blue Origin to delay the flight last week, but conditions appeared more favorable Saturday and mission managers pressed ahead with plans for an early Sunday liftoff.
From launch to touchdown: nine minutes and 28 seconds. While SpaceX tested its Falcon 9 landing system with ocean splashdowns before attempting an actual landing, Blue Origin is making the attempt on the rocket’s maiden flight. Appropriately enough, the company named the booster “So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance.”
While the 23-foot-wide first stage is powered by liquified natural gas, the 88-foot-tall upper stage is equipped with two hydrogen-burning BE-3U engines that generate a combined 320,000 pounds of thrust. They can be restarted in space up to three times, enabling the stage to place payloads in especially demanding orbits.
The New Glenn’s carbon-composite nose fairing, which encapsulates payloads during the climb to space, provides 16,184 cubic feet of volume, large enough to house an entire New Shepard rocket, the booster Blue Origin uses to launch space tourists on sub-orbital flights out of the lower atmosphere.
For its maiden flight, the New Glenn carried a Blue Origin-designed spacecraft known as Blue Ring, a sort of space tug that can host or deploy multiple satellites in different orbits while providing onboard computer support and even servicing.
The flight plan called for the upper stage and the attached Blue Ring test vehicle to reach an elliptical orbit with a high point of about 12,000 miles and a low point of around 1,500 miles. The mission is expected to last five hours and 50 minutes from start to finish.
The New Glenn flight profile includes a first stage touchdown on a Blue Origin landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean while the rocket’s upper stage propels a test payload known as Blue Ring Pathfinder into a highly elliptical orbit. / Credit: Blue Origin
Blue Ring is equipped with roll-out solar arrays stretching 144 feet, with 13 ports for hosted and deployable payloads and can accommodate satellites or other payloads weighing up to 2.5 tons on its upper deck. There are no such payloads on the initial “pathfinder” flight, but the spacecraft will be thoroughly checked out in orbit.
SpaceX began launching its Falcon 9 rockets in 2010 and now dominates the global commercial launch market, firing off 134 Falcon-family rockets last year and five so far in 2025. SpaceX has successfully recovered first stage boosters 395 times.
SpaceX also is building a gargantuan new rocket — the Super Heavy-Starship — with a seventh test flight on tap as early as Monday from the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, launch site. A variant of the rocket’s Starship upper stage is being built for NASA to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface as part of the Artemis program.
Some 225 Falcon 9 flights have launched 7,700 Starlink internet satellites since 2019 with thousands more planned. The company already has millions of customers around the world, giving it a formidable head start over potential competitors.
Amazon plans its own fleet of more than 3,232 broadband relay stations known as Project Kuiper. The company says it has booked up to 95 launches with Blue Origin, the European consortium Arianespace, United Launch Alliance and even SpaceX to get the data relay stations into orbit.
“Once deployed, the Kuiper System will serve individual households, as well as schools, hospitals, businesses, disaster relief efforts, government agencies and other organizations operating in places without reliable broadband,” Amazon says on its website.
Whether Amazon can succeed against SpaceX in the space-based internet services market remains to be seen. But Blue Origin’s New Glenn will provide an alternative to SpaceX when it comes to launch services.
The rocket was designed from the ground up to be “human rated,” enabling astronaut flights at some point in the future. If successful, the rocket will eventually be used to launch NASA space probes, classified military payloads, commercial satellites, lunar cargo ships and even piloted moon landers for NASA.
“The New Glenn rocket is all about significantly reducing the cost of access to space,” said Syracuse University professor and former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe. “This will give SpaceX some serious competition. … These are exciting times in the space business.”
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