Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launches into orbit on its maiden flight

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has successfully made it to space for its maiden flight, a few days after its planned January 13 launch was scrubbed. The vehicle passed the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, shortly after 2AM Eastern time on January 16. New Glenn’s booster separated from the rest of the rocket to make its way back to Earth towards a landing platform in the ocean by 2:10 AM, while its second stage and payload went on to reach orbit. The company has just announced on its live feed that it failed to land New Glenn’s booster, but it was never the launch’s primary purpose.

Dave Limp, the company’s CEO, previously stressed that the mission’s objective is to reach orbit. “Anything beyond that is a bonus,” he wrote in a tweet. He said that landing the booster was “ambitious” but that Blue Origin is still going for it and expects to “learn a lot” from the effort. Notably, it took SpaceX three years of landing tests before it was successfully able to land Falcon 9’s first stage on a drone ship in the ocean.

New Glenn is a heavy-lift launch vehicle with a booster that was designed to be reused for a minimum of 25 flights. Blue Origin describes it as its “giant, reusable rocket built for bigger things.” It has a massive payload capacity and can carry more than 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) and 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). For its maiden flight, the vehicle carried the company’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, which is part of its Blue Ring platform that will offer spacecraft services to clients like the Pentagon. The mission is meant to test Blue Ring’s core flight and ground systems, as well as its operational capabilities.