Bezos Set to Challenge Musk's Space X With Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin is scheduled to challenge rival Space X on Sunday providing its New Glenn rocket takes off as planned.

Blue Origin is set to launch its inaugural mission of the New Glenn rocket, named after John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit Earth, no earlier than Sunday, Jan. 12 at 1 a.m. ET, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The 320-foot-tall New Glenn, which Blue Origin has been developing for about a decade, features a reusable first stage, like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. The New Glenn is larger than Space X's Falcon 9 workhorse but still shy of their super heavy-lift Starship rocket.

The rocket won't be deploying any satellites on its first mission, dubbed NG-1, but will be transporting a payload of the company's new "Blue Ring Pathfinder" spacecraft platform designed to move satellites around in Earth orbit. "The pathfinder will validate Blue Ring's communications capabilities from orbit to ground," Blue Origin wrote in a mission description last month.

Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the New York Times that the launch has been "very long awaited," adding it will inject much needed competition into the rocket business, a niche that Elon Musk's SpaceX currently owns.

"SpaceX is clearly dominating the market for launching larger and heavier payloads," Mr. Harrison said. "There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX," adding, "I think a lot of people forget Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX."

In addition to Blue Ring, Bezos's company is in the early stages of development on Orbital Reef, a future private space station, and a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon. Like the Falcon 9 rockets by SpaceX, New Glenn seeks to be partially reusable, with the booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform named Jacklyn, after Mr. Bezos' mother.

Sunday's launch of New Glenn will mark the rocket's first National Security Space Launch certification flight. Blue Ring is part of the Defense Innovation Unit's (DIU) Orbital Logistics prototype effort. DIU funding is helping to enable future Department of Defense missions, the company noted on their website.

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