Blue Origin is delaying the launch of the New Glenn mega-rocket

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin postponed the opening ceremony the first orbital rocket, New Glenn, after experiencing an unknown problem with one of the vehicle’s subsystems early Monday morning.

While delays like this happen all the time in spaceflight, this once again calls into question the timing of the long-awaited launch. According to Eric Berger in Ars Technicathe company made the countdown deep enough that Blue Origin would need at least 48 hours to reset the rocket for launch.

Plus, conditions are expected to worsen in the Atlantic this week, and Blue Origin is scrambling to land New Glenn’s booster on a drone ship — similar to how Elon Musk’s SpaceX often recovers the core of its Falcon 9 rockets.

New Glenn’s success is critical to Blue Origin as the company seeks to enter the heavy-lift market currently dominated by SpaceX. Until now, Blue Origin has mainly focused on sending tourists and scientific experiments into suborbital space. The new Shepard rocket. The new Glenn was supposed to help launch a new business for Blue Origin already have contracts NASA, Space Force, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, etc. to deliver payloads into space.

Blue Origin has been preparing for the launch of New Glenn for several weeks, and finally took the 320-foot-tall rocket to the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. On January 9. At the time, the company was aiming for a January 12 release. But over the weekend, the company pushed back that target date by a day to improve the chances of a successful landing of the New Glenn booster.

New Glenn’s three-hour release window began at 1:00 a.m. ET on January 13. The company loaded the rocket with fuel. But it struggled to resolve an unspecified subsystem problem and repeatedly pushed back the startup time before turning it off. (Berger suggested that this was due to a blockage in a line that helps the gas flow away from the rocket.)

There is Blue Origin he said The main goal of New Glenn’s first launch is to “reach orbit safely” and everything beyond that is “icing on the cake”. If New Glenn reaches orbit, the rocket will carry the Blue Ring spacecraft demonstrator, which the company wants to use as a building block for a larger space-based economy.