Blue Origin is attempting its very first orbital flight tonight. And they’ll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean.
The rocket is fueled on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting ignition. Its three-hour launch window has just opened. And Blue Origin is webcasting it all live on their web page…
But whatever happens tonight, Ars Technica‘s senior space editor Eric Berger got to talk to a “affable and anxious” Jeff Bezos:
“It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, said by way of greeting… I asked what his expectations were for the launch of New Glenn, which has a three-hour window that opens at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Monday, January 13… “We would certainly like to achieve orbit, and get the Blue Ring Pathfinder into orbit,” Bezos said. “Landing the booster would be gravy on top of that. It’s kind of insane to try and land the booster. A more sane approach would probably be to try to land it into ocean. But we’re gonna go for it.”
Blue Origin has built a considerable amount of infrastructure on a drone ship, Jacklyn, that will be waiting offshore for the rocket to land upon. Was Bezos not concerned about putting that hardware at risk? “I’m worried about everything,” he admitted. However, the rocket has been programmed to divert from the ship if the avionics on board the vehicle sense that anything is off-nominal. And there is, of course, a pretty good chance of that happening. “We’ve done a lot of work, we’ve done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight,” Bezos said. “And you can’t be overconfident in these things… The reality is, there are a lot of things that go wrong, and you have to accept that, if something goes wrong, we’ll pick ourselves up and get busy for the second flight.”
Bezos also pointed out that 7% of all the people who have ever flown into space have done so on a Blue Origin vehicle — including himself, an experience he told Ars Technica “is kind of hard to beat… That really was very meaningful for a whole bunch of reasons.
“But this is, you know, the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And it’s a really big deal. You know, you don’t get very many first flights, yeah, and here we go.”
The rocket’s payload nose cone (or fairing) has the signatures of thousands of Blue Origin employees, according to a Blue Origin post on Instagram, calling it “a tribute to the hard work and passion for mission we all have here…” More details about the launch:
- Space.com notes that the launch “was initially scheduled for Jan. 10 and then Jan. 12, but Blue Origin postponed it due to rough offshore weather that could affect a rocket landing on the company’s recovery ship in the Atlantic.” Space Force officials forecast the chance of good liftoff conditions tonight are 50%.
- “We want to be clear about our objectives,” Blue Origin posted tonight on X.com. “This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious — but we’re going for it. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”
- The rocket will be visible on the coasts of South Carolina and North Carolina, Blue Origin posted on X.com