Blue Origin reaches orbit in first New Glenn rocket launch, misses booster landing
The New Glenn rocket, named after the first US astronaut to orbit Earth, has been in development for about a decade
Thirty storeys tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2am ET from Blue Origin’s launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines thundering for kilometres under cloudy skies on its second lift-off attempt this week.
Hundreds of employees at the company’s Kent, Washington headquarters and its Cape Canaveral, Florida rocket factory roared in applause as Blue Origin VP Ariane Cornell announced the rocket’s second stage made it to orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.
“We hit our key, critical, number-one objective, we got to orbit safely,” Cornell said on a company live stream. “And y’all we did it on our first go.”
Blue Origin said in a statement after the mission that New Glenn’s payload, an in-house test satellite, “is receiving data and performing well”.
