Blue Origin postpones launch of massive New Glenn rocket

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin Inaugural launch postponed from its first orbital rocket, New Glenn, early Monday morning after experiencing an unspecified problem with one of the vehicle’s subsystems.

While such delays happen all the time in spaceflight, this delay once again puts the timing of the long-awaited launch into question. According to Eric Berger In Ars TechnicaThe company has gone deep enough into the countdown that Blue Origin will likely need at least 48 hours to readjust the rocket for launch.

What’s more, conditions in the Atlantic are expected to worsen this week, and Blue Origin is trying to land the New Glenn booster on a drone ship — similar to how Elon Musk’s SpaceX recovers the cores of Falcon 9 rockets.

The success of New Glenn is crucial to Blue Origin, as the company tries to enter The heavy transport market currently dominated by SpaceX. Until now, Blue Origin has focused primarily on launching tourists and scientific experiments into suborbital space at its much smaller station. New Shepard missile. New Glenn is supposed to help open up new business for Blue Origin, which It already has contracts To deliver payloads into space with NASA, the Space Force, Amazon’s Kuiper Project, and more.

Blue Origin has been preparing to launch New Glenn for a few weeks, and has finally rolled out the 320-foot-tall rocket to the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. On January 9th. At that point, the company was targeting a January 12 launch. But over the weekend, the company pushed back that target date by a day in order to increase the odds of landing the New Glenn booster successfully.

New Glenn’s three-hour launch period began at 1 a.m. 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 several times before stopping it. (Berger said it had to do with ice blocking the line that helps vent gas away from the rocket.)

Blue Origin has it He said The primary goal of New Glenn’s first launch is “to reach orbit safely,” and anything beyond that “would be icing on the cake.” If New Glenn reaches orbit, the rocket will carry a display of its Blue Ring spacecraft, which the company wants to use as a building block for a larger space economy.