Blue Origin rocket launch, the rocket company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, on Thursday achieved one of the biggest successes in its history sending a rocket into orbit.
The maiden flight of the New Glenn, the company’s first rocket powerful enough to send satellites into space, lifted off just after 2 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The demonstration technology on the rocket, called the Blue Ring Pathfinder, was safely carried into orbit – making the mission successful.
But Blue Origin missed its bonus goal, which required returning a part of the New Glenn rocket’s first stage, called a booster, safely to the marine platform after liftoff.
This maneuver, designed to allow Blue Origin to reuse and refurbish rocket boosters — just like SpaceX does with its Falcon rockets — is meant to save money and reduce launch costs.
the long awaited flight
When the countdown timer reached zero, New Glenn ignited its seven engines and took off from the launchpad. The first stage, or the lowest part of the rocket, kept its engines running for more than three minutes before separating from the upper part of New Glenn.
The first stage booster then attempted to guide itself back to a precision landing on Jacklyn, an ocean platform that Bezos named after his mother. But as the booster prepared to restart its engines for landing, live data from the rocket cut off and Blue Origin webcast hosts were left to guess what might have happened. The host later confirmed that the booster had been lost.
The recovery maneuver was an attempt to replicate work Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been doing with its rockets for a decade.
However, SpaceX, which now regularly lands its Falcon 9 rocket boosters on pads on land and in the ocean, tried and failed four times to accomplish this task when it first developed the maneuver in the mid-2010s. Stay.
The remainder of New Glenn’s first launch went without a hitch. The entire mission is expected to last approximately six hours, ending around 8 a.m. ET.
After separation from the first stage, the upper part of the New Glenn rocket, carrying the experimental Blue Ring technology, fired its engines and continued to propel itself into orbit.
Once in space, the rocket removed its payload fairing, a shell-like structure designed to shield satellites during launch. And the second stage continued to fire its engines until it reached orbital speed – which typically exceeds 17,000 mph (27,359 kph), which is 22 times the speed of sound. It is.
The exposed blue ring demonstrator must remain attached to New Glenn’s upper stage for the duration of the mission, and not separate from the rocket as a satellite typically does.
