SpaceX Falcon has a competitor: Blue Origin launched the New Glenn partially reusable rocket for the first time

The new heavy rocket New Glenn, created from scratch by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company, was launched into space for the first time. The new rocket should become a competitor to SpaceX’s heavy rocket, Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin engineers have been working toward this day for over ten years. Today – January 16, 2025 at 10:03 Moscow time – the rocket took off from the cosmodrome in Florida and launched the payload into Earth orbit.

Image source: Blue Origin

Shortly after launch, the company announced the successful separation of the second stage from its payload. Today, the load was a stand made of control modules of the future Blue Ring Pathfinder ship, which is inseparable from the second stage. Based on this, Blue Origin engineers will check communication with the module and overall control. In the future, the Blue Ring module will operate as an orbital delivery vehicle to transfer customer payloads into assigned orbits, and will also serve other missions.

The New Glenn second stage is capable of delivering 45 tons of payload to low orbit. The Blue Ring ship will be able to operate 3 tons of payload. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is capable of throwing up to 64 tons of cargo into LEO. Both of them will share orders for sending heavy cargo into space.

Like the SpaceX Falcon Heavy first stage, the New Glenn first stage is reusable with an estimated 25 launch times. Blue Origin today attempted to land New Glenn’s reusable first stage on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean called Jacklyn, named after Jeff Bezos’ mother. The launch vehicle was able to fire its three engines during atmospheric reentry as planned, but failed to land.

«“We didn’t have a booster landing, but we were close,” a Blue Origin spokesperson said. “We collected so much data.” A successful landing would be a surprise: the company had repeatedly stressed in the lead-up to the launch that it was a secondary goal that was unlikely to be achieved on the NG-1’s debut mission.