The billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space business, Blue Origin, has warned that bad nighttime weather could result in a postponed lift-off for the second day in a row, despite the company’s aspirations of launching its massive new rocket early Tuesday morning.
Originally, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket, named New Glenn after the renowned American astronaut John Glenn, was supposed to launch for the first time in a three-hour window beginning at 1:00 am (0600 GMT) Monday.
The launch was eventually canceled due to many countdown pauses; the corporation subsequently stated that it had identified a problem with “ice forming in a purge line on an auxiliary power unit” for some hydraulic systems.
Blue Origin said it would aim for another three-hour window beginning at 1:00 am Tuesday, but warned “poor weather forecast at LC-36” — its launch site at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida — “could result in missing this window.”
Amazon founder Bezos is targeting fellow tech innovator Elon Musk, the only guy in the world with more fortune than he has, with the NG-1 mission.
SpaceX, Musk’s company, is the market leader in orbital launches thanks to its widely used Falcon 9 rockets, which are now essential for NASA, the Pentagon, and the commercial sector.
From the nearby launch control room, Bezos, who launched Blue Origin in 2000 and celebrated his 61st birthday on Sunday, saw Monday’s events.
For his part, Musk said, “Good luck!” to Blue Origin on X.
“SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor… this is great,” G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.
Upping the high-stakes rivalry, SpaceX plans another orbital test of Starship — its gargantuan new-generation rocket — later this week.
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