Highlights: Blue Origin’s New Glenn reaches orbit on maiden voyage

We’ve wrapped up our live coverage for the day. Read more about the successful launch of Blue Origin’s first orbital rocket here or scroll through the posts below to relive the event as it unfolded.

The second stage of the New Glenn rocket is currently gliding through orbit, carrying the Blue Ring Pathfinder payload on its head.

But the journey isn’t over yet.

In another hour or so, New Glenn’s upper stage will orient itself to point down toward Earth. And about four hours after that — sometime around 8 a.m. ET — the rocket is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere.

A Blue Origin spokesperson did not respond when asked where, exactly, the vehicle is expected to reenter. But it will likely aim to burn up over a remote area of the ocean — as is common for second-stage rockets, which either blaze back to Earth or are maneuvered into a “graveyard orbit.”

Elon Musk, left, and Jeff Bezos.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said he hopes to die on Mars — “just not on impact.”

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has said he hopes planet Earth will be turned into a sort of national park. (He even talked about it during his high school graduation speech in 1982, local media reported.)

Those may be among the most attention-grabbing sentiments expressed by the billionaires. And each hints at the framework they use to picture humanity’s future in outer space.

“We really have to move heavy industry and polluting industry off Earth,” Bezos told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a 2021 interview, conducted shortly after Bezos himself traveled to space for the first time on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket.

Bezos said he hopes to put “dirty polluting stuff” like manufacturing “chips and microchips” in outer space — a project he acknowledged would take decades.

Bezos has also mentioned hypothetical orbital platforms called O’Neill colonies as possible places to live.

A visualization of a hypothetical O'Neill colony.

Musk, meanwhile, has frequently expressed his desire to establish permanent settlements on other planets, most notably Mars, in order to “preserve the light of consciousness” in case planet Earth becomes uninhabitable for humans.

And while the New Glenn rocket that Blue Origin is debuting today may be a small, precursory step toward realizing Bezos’ dream — Musk’s SpaceX is already developing the rocket the company envisions will carry people to the red planet for the first time: Starship.

Jeff Bezos is seen in the control room along with company engineers and launch officials.

Blue Origin’s founder and financier — Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos — was sitting in the control room alongside company engineers and launch officials for New Glenn’s big moment.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. And while it’s taken the company more than two decades to reach this point, Bezos — who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 — has said he’s putting more focus on his space-faring endeavors than ever before.

Elon Musk, CEO of rival rocket company SpaceX, shared his congratulations to Blue Origin and team on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022.

It’s an apt acknowledgement from Musk. SpaceX famously did not reach orbit on its first attempt in the 2000s. In fact, the company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, failed on its first three attempts — and nearly left SpaceX bankrupt — before finally succeeding in September 2008.

New Glenn’s namesake, storied NASA astronaut and US Senator John Glenn, died in 2016.

But before his passing, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos got a chance to tell him about the orbital class rocket that would be named for him.

During tonight’s launch broadcast, a Blue Origin VP Ariane Cornell read a note that Glenn shared with Bezos.

New Glenn packs significant power. Dubbed a “heavy-lift” vehicle, its capabilities lie between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and the more powerful Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.

New Glenn is expected to amply outpower United Launch Alliance’s new rocket, the Vulcan Centaur.

Blue Origin’s rocket will also best SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, which can haul up to 22.8 metric tons (50,265 pounds) to space. New Glenn is capable of carrying about double that mass.

And notably, New Glenn may also be roughly the same price as a Falcon 9 — reportedly around $60 million to $70 million per launch.

The question, however, is whether Blue Origin will be able to sustain a competitive price point, said Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space, which provides data and analysis about the space sector.

And though New Glenn outpowers the Falcon 9, SpaceX is in the process of developing the groundbreaking flagship of its rocket arsenal.

SpaceX’s Starship is the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed. It’s not yet operational, but the company is barreling toward the seventh test flight of a full Starship rocket. As billed, the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter-tall) Starship rocket dwarfs New Glenn in every sense: Musk has said he hopes Starship will haul up to 300 tons to orbit.

United Launch Alliance Vulcan, SpaceX Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin New Glenn, SpaceX Starship.

In this undated handout photo, New Glenn’s first and second stages are in the process of production at Blue Origin’s orbital launch vehicle factory at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in June 2023.

This launch is a long time coming.

Blue Origin began developing New Glenn over a decade ago. And the company previously projected it would lift off for the first time in 2020.

That, obviously, did not stick: delays with development of the rocket’s engine, the BE-4, and other setbacks shifted the schedule significantly.

It should be noted, however, that Blue Origin has branded itself as a company that aims to take a slow, diligent approach to rocket development that doesn’t “cut any corners,” according to Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin and funds the company.

The company’s mascot is a tortoise, paying homage to “The Tortoise and the Hare” fable that made the “slow and steady wins the race” mantra a childhood staple.

“We believe slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Bezos said in 2016. Those comments could be seen as an attempt to position Blue Origin as the anti-SpaceX, which is known to embrace speed and trial-and-error over slow, meticulous development processes.

The company’s motto is also “Gradatim ferociter” — a latin phrase that means “step by step, ferociously.” It’s a nod to the company’s goal of mapping out ambitious objectives and taking a diligent, methodical approach to realizing those dreams.

New Glenn’s first-stage rocket booster appears to have failed to hit its mark landing on a seafaring platform in the ocean.

Blue Origin had, however, attempted to manage expectations that it would be able to complete the difficult maneuver on the first attempt.

The booster landing “is incredibly hard to pull off — especially for the first time you try it, but you might even say we’re just a little crazy to try it on the first flight, but the data we get for flying the complete mission profile is incredibly valuable.” said Ariane Cornell, VP of in-space systems at Blue Origin.

“Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is a bonus,” she added later.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday.

Cheers just erupted in the control room as launch controllers declared that the New Glenn rocket’s upper stage is officially in orbit.

That was the “key, critical, No. 1 objective of the night,” as Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin VP, pointed out.

It’s not clear whether New Glenn’s rocket booster made it to its intended landing site. But there was no footage of the touchdown attempt, and the booster’s telemetry data is frozen on the livestream.

The New Glenn rocket’s first-stage booster has now burned through most of its fuel, and the company declared “Main Engine Cutoff” or “MECO.”

Now, the first-stage is going to begin its trek back down to its landing zone — a seafaring platform awaiting its arrival in the Atlantic Ocean.

Meanwhile, New Glenn’s upper stage — holding the precious cargo for this mission — will carry on and aim to accomplish the primary objective of tonight’s flight: Entering orbit around Earth.

The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket passed Max Q.

The New Glenn rocket just hit “Max Q,” an aerospace term that refers to the point during flight at which a vehicle experiences its maximum dynamic pressure.

Put simply: It’s when the rocket is moving at very high speed, at a time when the atmosphere is still pretty thick, putting a lot of pressure on the vehicle.

The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sits at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station prior to its launch in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday.

The engines at the base of New Glenn have fired up.

The water deluge system — which can funnel thousands of gallons of water at the base of the rocket in short order — has powered on, dampening the sound and temperatures from the blazing rocket engines.

Now, New Glenn is blazing toward space, marking the first time the 30-story launch vehicle has taken flight.

For this inaugural mission, a smooth flight is not guaranteed.

But the eventual success of New Glenn is instrumental to some of Blue Origin’s most ambitious goals.

The rocket could one day power national security launches, haul batches of satellites to space and even help in the construction of a space station that Blue Origin is developing with commercial partners.

The US Space Force selected Blue Origin, ULA and SpaceX in June to compete for $5.6 billion worth of Pentagon contracts for national security missions slated to launch over the next four years.

This animation depicts how New Glenn would deploy a constellation.

Blue Origin also has deals with several companies for satellite launch services: The contracts include plans to help deploy Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellites and a recently inked deal with AST SpaceMobile to help launch the Midland, Texas-based company’s space-based cellular broadband network.

The aforementioned space station Blue Origin is building, called Orbital Reef, is part of a collaboration between the company and several other partners, such as Sierra Space and Boeing.

The concept imagines a mixed-use business park in orbit — designed to give astronauts an alternative destination in space as the aging International Space Station retires.

The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sits at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station prior to its launch in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday.

Blue Origin has just hit a crucial milestone. Top launch officials monitoring various aspects of tonight’s mission each just deemed the rocket ready for takeoff.

It appears the wayward boat that prompted an abrupt countdown clock hold is now out of the way.

Currently the countdown clock shows about 10 minutes. But Blue Origin does have the option to add more time back on the clock or hold the countdown again, and the company has made liberal use of those moves so far.

The name “New Glenn” follows Blue Origin’s pattern of naming rockets after pioneering NASA astronauts from the earliest days of human spaceflight.

John Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth aboard NASA’s Friendship 7 capsule in 1962. The mission was part of the Mercury program that paved the way for NASA’s moon landing program, which defined the 20th century space race between the US and the Soviet Union.

John Glenn aboard Friendship 7.

He later served for nearly a quarter century as a US senator. And in 1998, he returned to space aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery at age 77, becoming the oldest person ever to reach orbit.

Blue Origin’s suborbital space tourism rocket, “New Shepard,” is named for Alan Shepard, who was a member of NASA’s first astronaut class and in 1961 became the first American to travel to space.

Shepard’s eldest daughter, Laura Shepard Churchley, flew to space on a 10-minute flight aboard New Shepard in 2021.

If you’ve followed SpaceX Falcon 9 launches for a while, you may know that the company routinely lands each vehicle’s first stage — the bottommost portion of the rocket that gives the initial burst of power at liftoff — on seafaring platforms that SpaceX calls “droneships.”

Musk’s company has bestowed some intruiging names on those vessels — including Just Read the Instructions, A Shortfall of Gravitas, and Of Course I Still Love You. Those are all nods to Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series of science fiction books.

Blue Origin hopes to replicate SpaceX’s success in recovering rocket boosters in order to drive down costs.

Named for Bezos’ mother, the company’s “Jacklyn” landing pad was initially going to be on board a retrofitted cargo ship that Bezos purchased years ago.

But Blue Origin abandoned those plans in 2022, saying it would seek a more “cost-effective alternative” to refashioning the ship to catch rockets.

The company has since debuted a new version of “Jacklyn” — a platform that looks much like SpaceX’s droneships.

No humans will be on board the 380-foot-long vessel during landing, according to Blue Origin.

With about 11 minutes left on the clock, the countdown has come to an abrupt halt.

Blue Origin just explained why: A boat wandered into the keep-out zone in the waters near the rocket’s launch site on Florida’s East Coast.

Believe it or not — this is a common problem for rockets.

Safety officials require nearby vessels to get out of the area in case the rocket malfunctions during takeoff. But the occasional mariner can travel too close.