Bezos' Blue Origin has successfully launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit — a feat 15 years in the making

Just after 2 a.m. Eastern time on January 16, 2025, a new rocket blasted off from the Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. By reaching orbit, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket launch marks a milestone for an ambitious commercial space company.

As a space policy expert, I see New Glenn’s success as a big leap forward for Blue Origin and a good sign for the expanding, ambitious commercial space industry.

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Blue Origin's New Glenn took off on its first flight on January 16.

step by step

While SpaceX may be the best-known commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin is two years older. The company was founded in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with a vision of millions of people living and working in space.

To advance this vision, the company is developing its own family of reusable rockets, which could improve access to space.

Blue Origin’s motto is step by step violentlyLatin for "step by step, violently." Bezos explained that this reflects the company's approach to spaceflight.

"If you're building a flying machine, you can't take shortcuts. If you do, you create the illusion that it's going to be faster," Bezos said at the 2016 Pathfinder Awards.

Following this step-by-step approach, it took Blue Origin 15 years to launch its first rocket. New Shepard was launched in 2015 and named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

New Shepard doesn't have enough energy to reach orbit. Instead, it flies along a suborbital trajectory. This means it will fly to the edge of space, experiencing only a few minutes of low gravity before returning to the launch site.

The New Shepard is unique in that it can carry passengers. It first achieved this on July 20, 2021, when it carried three people, including Bezos, into space. Since then, New Shepard has carried out 8 manned flights and 21 unmanned flights. Notably, it launched Star Trek's William Shatner into space on October 13, 2021.

The New Shepard rocket looks like a cylinder with legs and a rounded top that sits on a landing pad. — New Shepard, the predecessor to New Glenn, is Blue Origin's rocket used for suborbital flights. AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File

However, New Shepard is not without its problems. In 2022, it suffered engine failure a minute after liftoff. With no one on board, the launch escape system was activated, allowing the capsule to return safely to Earth. The landing also meant that if anyone was on board, they would make it back safely.

enlarge envelope

While Blue Origin learned a lot from New Shepard's flight, the company needed a more powerful rocket. New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit, was designed for this type of rocket.

Blue Origin began developing New Glenn in 2013 but did not publicly announce it until 2016. It consists of two parts called stages. The first stage has seven engines. Once this stage has exhausted all its fuel, the goal is to have it separate and return to a barge at sea, much like SpaceX's Falcon 9.

At this point, the three second-stage engines light up, taking the rocket the rest of the way into space.

Unfortunately, during the first launch on January 16, the first stage booster was destroyed while trying to return to the landing barge. Before the launch, company officials had said they were unsure whether the booster could be recovered on this flight but would try anyway.

New Glenn is more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, shorter than the Apollo-era Saturn V (363 feet, or 111 m) but taller than the Space Shuttle when fully stacked (184 feet, or 64 m) and SpaceX's Falcon 9 (229 feet, or 70 m). It would have twice the power of the Space Shuttle but only half the power of the Saturn V.

Comparing rocket sizes, SpaceX’s Starship is the tallest and Astra rocket is the tallest. — New Glenn is smaller than SpaceX's Starship, but larger than the shuttle. Jurgenspacerocket/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In addition to New Glenn, the company is also developing the Blue Moon lunar lander for future NASA lunar missions. It is also developing Blue Ring, a space servicing platform that can refuel and move satellites.

Blue Origin is also a key component of Orbital Reef, a planned low-Earth orbit commercial space station. Blue Origin likens the orbital reef to a "multi-purpose business park" that will provide space for research, development and manufacturing in orbit.

Impact on commercial space

Blue Origin's successful entry into orbit with New Glenn is an important step for the larger commercial space industry. Importantly, this will bring competition to SpaceX, which some believe has a near monopoly on launch services in the United States.

Competition in launch services is a valuable thing. It incentivizes both companies to provide the best service at the lowest cost. Having multiple launch providers is also a sign of a healthy commercial market.

Competition also provides access to space options in case a company must ground its fleet of rockets. This happened to SpaceX multiple times in 2024, when three of its rockets experienced problems during launch. The situation leaves customers with no choice but to wait for SpaceX to investigate and resolve the issue.

While New Glenn will launch unmanned missions in the coming years, Blue Origin signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA in 2023 to develop more commercial projects, including crewed vehicles.

The Blue Origin crewed spacecraft will give NASA more options when it comes to transporting humans to and from low-Earth orbit and even the moon.

Although New Glenn's launch has been 25 years in the making, it's a major achievement for Blue Origin — and one that's necessary if it wants to aggressively continue its goals of space travel. .