INAUGURAL LAUNCH OF BLUE ORIGIN’S NEW GLENN ROCKET, Jan 16, 2025, CCSFS, 1:00 am ET

Update, January 15, 7:00 pm ET:  The company issued a statement of limited utility at 5:49 pm ET saying the vehicle is ready but they might or might not try to launch.

Update, January 15, 12:00 pm ET:  The weather forecast is only 40% favorable, but so far Blue Origin is proceeding as planned for launch January 16 between 1:00 and 4:00 am Eastern.

Update, January 13, 9:15 pm ET:  Blue Origin changed its mind and will wait until Thursday.

Update, January 13, 6:50 pm ET:  Blue Origin says they will try again overnight, same launch window — Jan 14, 1:00-4:00 am ET — while acknowledging the poor weather forecast means they may miss it.

The weather forecast is for a 70% Probability of Violation (POV), which means a 30% chance they can launch.

Update, January 13, 3:10 am ET:  Blue Origin just scrubbed the launch, just over two hours into the three-hour launch window. They said they were troubleshooting a vehicle subsystem issue that would take them beyond the end of the window, which would have closed at 4:00 am. They do not have a date for when they will try again.

Update, January 12:  As of 4:30 pm ET, the launch is still on for 1:00 am tomorrow morning, with the window open for three hours.  Blue says they will webcast the launch starting an hour before launch.

New Glenn’s inaugural mission is targeting January 13. Our three-hour launch window opens Monday at 1 a.m. EST (0600 UTC).

Join us here for the webcast hosted by Ariane Cornell and Denisse Aranda beginning an hour before launch! pic.twitter.com/SkuvkZ3m8s

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) January 12, 2025

Update, January 11: the launch as been delayed again due to weather. They’ll try on Monday January 13. Same time.

Update, January 9:  the launch has been delayed two days due to weather  — “a high sea state in the Atlantic where we hope to land our booster.”

Update, January 6, 2025, 9:10 pm ET:  Blue Origin has finally officially announced the launch date as January 10. A three-hour launch window opens at 1:00 am ET.  Liftoff will be from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Staiton.

Update, January 6, 2025:  The latest FAA update shows only January 10, with no backup date.

Update, January 4, 2025: Blue Origin continues to be silent about the launch date, but the FAA’s website shows a slip to January 8, and the backup launch date is two days (not one day) later. The primary launch date/time is January 8 in a window between 1:00-4:45 am EST.

Update, January 2, 2025:  The FAA’s website now shows the same dates, but different times for the launch.  Z (Zulu) is the same as GMT or UTC. The primary time in EST now is January 6, 1:00-4:45 am. The backup time is January 6 11:00 pm-January 7 4:45 am EST.

Update, December 30, 2024:  The FAA’s operations plan advisory shows this launch as potentially taking place on January 6 between 0430Z and 0745Z — which is January 5 11:30 pm EST – January 6 2:45 am EST, with January 7 at the same time (so January 6-7 EST) as a backup. So we are now using January 5 at 11:30 pm EST as the placeholder. (“Z” is Zulu and is the same as GMT or UTC.)

Update, December 29, 2024:  Blue Origin is very close to launching, but they still have not provided a date.  On December 27 they successfully completed a static fire test and company owner Jeff Bezos tweeted “Next stop launch” so presumably it could be any day.  They had wanted to launch before the end of 2024, but that seems unlikely — though not impossible. We’re putting this back on our Calendar using a January 1, 2025 date as a placeholder — it is not an actual launch date.  We’ll keep updating this until the company announces the actual date.

Update, September 6:  Statements from NASA and Blue Origin indicate the launch will slip to November. A date was not provided.

NASA is taking ESCAPADE off of the flight and it will not launch until at least the spring of 2025. They do not want to proceed with fueling the two spacecraft when the launch date is uncertain since it might have to be defueled if there are delays, leading to cost growth.

Blue Origin posted on X that “We plan to move up New Glenn’s second flight, originally scheduled for December, into November” but that apparently does not mean the second launch of New Glenn will be in November.  Apparently they are just moving the payload that was to be on the second flight onto the first flight as that first flight slips from October to November.

We’re supportive of NASA’s decision to target the ESCAPADE mission for no earlier than spring 2025 and look forward to the flight. We plan to move up New Glenn’s second flight, originally scheduled for December, into November. New Glenn will carry Blue Ring technology and mark…

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) September 6, 2024

Original entry: Blue Origin is planning the inaugural launch of its New Glenn rocket no earlier than October 13, 2024 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, FL (adjacent to Kennedy Space Center).

Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962, this rocket can do that and go further.  Blue Origin’s existing rocket, New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space on a suborbital mission on April 12, 1961, is suborbital only.

Aboard the New Glenn rocket will be a set of two NASA probes, Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE), headed for Mars.  They are part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program.  According to NASA, they were supposed to launch along with NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission in 2022, but a year’s delay in that launch changed the trajectory and it no longer went in the right direction for these probes.

Update: That NASA fact sheet said the mass of each was less than 90 kilograms each, but NASA now says the mass is 209 kilograms empty and 535 kg fueled and the name can be presented as ESCAPADE, or EscaPADE depending on preference.