It’s a Scrub for the Inaugural Flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is still on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch was scrubbed about 3:00 am ET this morning, two-thirds of the way through the three-hour launch window after a series of unexplained delays. The main goal for this first mission, humorously designated “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,”  is just to safely reach orbit, but that will have to wait. The company, owned by Jeff Bezos, has not announced when they will try again.

The launch window for New Glenn-1 (NG-1) was open from 1:00-4:00 am ET this morning. Blue Origin said the webcast would begin an hour before launch. When it started at 12:30 am ET, that suggested a planned liftoff time of 1:30 am ET. The first officially announced time was 1:31 am ET, but over the next two hours it slipped to 1:52 am ET, then 2:07 am ET, then 2:27 am ET, then 2:48 am ET, and finally 3:15 am ET, with no explanation as to why. Webcast commentator Ariane Cornell simply repeatedly stated that they were making sure the launch teams and subteams were “aligned,” the weather was within bounds, and “if we need to add a couple more minutes, that is quite all right with us.”

As 3:15 am ET neared, however, the countdown clock disappeared from the webcast and she soon announced a scrub: “We are standing down today’s launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window. We are reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt.”

No further information was provided. [Update: At 6:50 pm ET, Blue Origin posted on its website that the “scrub was due to ice forming in a purge line on an auxiliary power unit that powers some of our hydraulic systems.”]

Blue Origin already launches a smaller suborbital rocket, New Shepard, from a site in West Texas that takes passengers and/or uncrewed payloads on brief (about 10 minute) trips over the imaginary line that separates air and space at 100 kilometers (62 miles) and back to Earth.

But the company’s long term goal is orbital flight. New Glenn will lift off from Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at CCSFS, adjacent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and very close to the factory where New Glenn is built just outside KSC’s gate at Exploration Park. It can deliver 45 Metric Tons (MT) into low Earth orbit or 13 MT into geostationary transfer orbit.

The rockets are named after the first American to reach space, Alan Shepard, and the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn, in 1961 and 1962 respectively.

The company compares New Glenn to the Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon more than 60 years ago because they plan to use it to go to the Moon as well. Blue Origin is one of two companies under contract to NASA to build a Human Landing System for the Artemis program. (SpaceX is the other.)  During its webcast this morning, Blue Origin imposed a sketch of the Saturn V next to New Glenn-1 on the pad to illustrate the comparison. At 98 meters (321 feet) tall, New Glenn is a little shy of Saturn V at 111 meters (363 feet). Saturn V also had a larger payload fairing: 10 meters (33 feet) compared to New Glenn’s 7 meters (23 feet).

New Glenn’s first stage is powered by seven BE-4 engines designed and manufactured by Blue Origin. They use liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen for propellant.  The second stage has two BE-3U engines, which use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The engines are designed and developed at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, WA, and produced in Huntsville, AL.

The first stage is reusable, designed to make 25 flights. It will land on a barge in the Atlantic named Jacklyn after Bezos’s mother.

New Glenn is intended to compete with SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) for “heavy lift” launches for customers including NASA and DOD.  (ULA uses two of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines to power its new Vulcan rocket.) NG-1 will be the first of two certification missions required by DOD before they commit to using the rocket for their most valuable payloads.

As often happens with new rockets, NG-1 already has been delayed many times. At one point, NASA planned to use it to send two small spacecraft, Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE), to Mars. They are part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program and were supposed to launch along with NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission in 2022, but a year’s delay in Psyche’s launch changed the trajectory and it no longer went in the right direction for these probes. In September 2024, however, NASA decided to take them off NG-1 because the launch date was so uncertain. They didn’t want to proceed with fueling the spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, only to have to defuel them if there were more delays since it would add cost. NASA is assessing options for how to get them to their destination.

Thus the only payload on this flight is Blue Origin’s own Blue Ring Pathfinder, a test object that will not separate from the second stage.

This one is just a test. When it’s operational, Blue Ring will be able to accommodate as many as 13 payloads with a mass of up to 3 MT and deploy each of them into various Earth orbits or cislunar space. The company advertises that Blue Ring will provide “end-to-end services that span hosting, transportation, refueling, data relay, and logistics, including an ‘in-space’ edge computing capability.” Blue Ring Pathfinder was developed as part of DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU’s) Orbital Logistics Vehicle project.