Cape Canaveral (Reuters): Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin said on Sunday that its New Glenn rocket booster had touched down after launch, marking its first landing of a reused booster and intensifying its rivalry with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The rocket, which had a launch window of 6:45am to 12:19pm ET on Sunday, lifted off at around 7:25am ET (1125 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the booster touchdown happened about 10 minutes later.
New Glenn carried AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite to low-Earth orbit in a flight that marks a pivotal step for the company. The mission was key to demonstrating that New Glenn, a 29-story heavy-lift rocket, has a reliable booster reuse capability and can compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The rocket’s booster, dubbed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” previously flew on the NG-2 mission in November and was recovered, setting up this week’s milestone attempt.
The booster’s name is a nod to a Han Solo line in the film Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Following a series of delays earlier this month, the mission comes amid a surge of activity in the space sector, including the successful Nasa Artemis II lunar flyby that took humans further from Earth than any had traveled before.
Blue Origin had said in November that it would build a bigger, more powerful variant of its New Glenn rocket, called New Glenn 9×4.
Satellite constellation
New Glenn is designed for the higher end of the commercial launch market with a seven-metre (23-foot) nose cone allowing it to carry bulkier payloads, including multiple satellites in a single mission.
“We foundationally developed New Glenn for what we think space is going to look like 50 to 100 years from now,” said New Glenn Vice President Jordan Charles.
AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7, carried into orbit on NG-3, is the second satellite in its next-generation Block 2 constellation. The satellite features what the company describes as the largest commercial communications array deployed in low-Earth orbit.
Designed to connect directly with smartphones, the satellite is part of an effort to build a space-based cellular broadband network, similar to Amazon’s Leo or SpaceX’s Starlink.
SpaceX vs Blue Origin
The successful booster landing signals that Blue Origin is narrowing a gap with SpaceX, which this news agency reported earlier this month confidentially filed for a US IPO targeting a valuation of about $1.75 trillion.
SpaceX and Blue Origin, in the latest competition between the billionaire-run companies, have been racing to help return humans to the moon ahead of a planned crewed mission by China in 2030 by designing the lunar landers Nasa will use.
SpaceX is building a massive stainless-steel Starship-based Human Landing System, while Blue Origin is developing a more traditional Blue Moon lander and aims to achieve a pivotal uncrewed soft lunar landing (Mark 1) this summer.
Nasa’s next Artemis mission planned for next year is expected to test both landers while in Earth orbit before the mission that would return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. “New Glenn is the vehicle that can take Nasa or anyone, anywhere in the solar system,” Laura Magginis, New Glenn mission vice president said.
