\n<\/p>\n
On Thursday morning, at a time when most people in the United States were sleeping, Jeff Bezos\u2019 space company sent its first rocket into orbit.<\/p>\n
At 2:03 a.m. Eastern time, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night into day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, nudged upward and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the color of combustion of the rocket\u2019s methane fuel.<\/p>\n
Thirteen minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit.<\/p>\n
The launch was a major success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket company. It should quiet critics who say that the company has been too slow compared with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has dominated global spaceflight industry in recent years. New Glenn could prove a credible competitor with Mr. Musk\u2019s company and win launch contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense, as well as commercial contracts.<\/p>\n
For at least one moment, however, the two richest people in the world warmly cheered each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!\u201d Mr. Musk wrote on X, the social media site that he owns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThank you!\u201d Mr. Bezos replied.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bezos posted a series of pictures and videos. \u201cBeautiful,\u201d Mr. Musk commented on one of the images.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The upward flight appeared almost flawless, but Blue Origin\u2019s stretch goal of landing the booster stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean failed. As planned, the booster fired three of its engines to slow down, but then the stream of data stopped, indicating that the booster had been lost.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring,\u201d Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
For years, Mr. Bezos has talked of an ambitious vision of millions of people working and living in space, sending spacecraft to the moon and building space stations. Skeptics, however, pointed out that Blue Origin had not sent a single thing to orbit since the company was founded nearly a quarter-century ago, two years before SpaceX.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Now it has.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was reason to doubt before this launch if Blue Origin actually had the technical capability,\u201d said Todd Harrison, a space policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. \u201cAnd now they\u2019ve proven that they do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until now, Blue Origin had launched only its smaller New Shepard rocket, which sent space tourists and science experiments on suborbital jaunts to the edge of space, providing a few minutes of floating. Mr. Bezos was among the first passengers on a New Shepard flight in 2021.<\/p>\n
New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the first American to orbit Earth, dwarfs New Shepard. Indeed, a New Shepard could fit within New Glenn\u2019s payload area in the nose cone. Reaching the speed to circle the Earth is a much more complex task than the New Shepard vehicle has achieved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cAll of the sudden, you\u2019ve graduated to a new level of credibility,\u201d said Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at BryceTech, a consulting firm in Alexandria, Va.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
When Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, he said it would be ready by the end of 2020. A huge Blue Origin rocket factory rose just outside NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but there were scant signs of the rocket itself. The original target date came and went.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin was selected to launch a NASA mission \u2014 ESCAPADE, which is to take measurements of the Martian atmosphere \u2014 in October last year. But NASA pulled the spacecraft off the inaugural flight when it became uncertain that Blue Origin could be ready in time.<\/p>\n
Instead, this launch took to orbit a prototype of Blue Ring, a vehicle that could move satellites around in Earth orbit. For this flight, the prototype \u2014 Blue Origin calls it a \u201cpathfinder\u201d \u2014 remained attached to the rocket\u2019s second stage testing the communication, power and flight computer systems.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin says that in the future Blue Ring will be able to move payloads between very different orbits, including those that go out as far as the moon and perform a variety of tasks.<\/p>\n
The Blue Ring prototype worked as expected during the six-hour mission, Blue Origin said.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin still lags far behind SpaceX in accomplishments \u2014 Mr. Musk\u2019s company launched more than 100 times last year. But New Glenn could offer long-awaited competition for SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which currently dominate the launch industry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201dThe only remaining question, I think, is how fast they can ramp up the launch rate,\u201d Mr. Harrison said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Limp said that, with a successful inaugural launch of New Glenn, Blue Origin is aiming for a second launch in the spring and that he wanted six to eight launches this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat would be a good year for us, I think,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cJeff would like us to do more, so we\u2019re pushing,\u201d Mr. Limp added, referring to Mr. Bezos, who was sitting next to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s very realistic,\u201d Mr. Bezos said.<\/p>\n
One of Blue Origin\u2019s contracts is with Mr. Bezos\u2019 other company, Amazon, to launch satellites for Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites. It will compete with SpaceX\u2019s Starlink system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Blue Origin officials have not yet announced what will be going up this year, but the launches could include an uncrewed moon lander. Blue Origin is working on a spacecraft that is to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon a few years from now.<\/p>\n
During an interview last year on the CBS News program \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d a Blue Origin official revealed that the company was developing a small lunar lander that it called Blue Moon Mark 1, scheduled to launch to the moon in 2025.<\/p>\n
Mr. Limp said that was still the plan, and the spacecraft is currently under construction.<\/p>\n
A full-scale model of the Mark 1 lander dominates the lobby of the Blue Origin building in Florida.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s supposed to go this year,\u201d Mr. Bezos said. \u201cI think it will go this year.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n