Watch Bezos’ new super rocket fire up its engines. It’s about to launch.

In the continuing saga of billionaires and big races comes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with his latest space vehicle, New Glenn.

The gun, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, is named after him NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first person to orbit the Earth in 1962. Although it is much shorter than SpaceXit is imposing StarshipIt is about the size of NASA’s mega lunar rocket, the Space Launch System.

Years in the making, the commercial rocket is on the brink of its first flight.

On Friday, while firmly attached to its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, New Glenn nailed its final suit test, firing all seven of its engines for 24 seconds. It was the first time that Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, had operated the entire rocket stacked as an integrated system. The flashes of the engines pierced through steam vapours, like cracks of lightning through the storm clouds.

“The next launch stop,” Bezos said in a post on X, the social networking platform of his space launch competitor, Elon Musk. Despite their rivalry, Musk responded with a desire for divinity.

Tweet may have been deleted

A video of the test, called a hot fire, can be seen in the post above. The demonstration involved a complete countdown of food and practice. New Glenn’s booster runs on methane and liquid oxygen, while the rocket’s second stage, which propels a spacecraft further into space, runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

When all seven booster engines fire in concert, they will produce enough horsepower for two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at full tilt, said Blue Origin CEO David Limp. For 13 seconds of the hot-fire test, New Glenn was operating at 100 percent of its thrust capacity.

Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000, but his first small rocket, New Shepard, focused primarily on space tourism, providing short flights for rich passengers to the edge of space and back.

Star Trek actor William Shatner, one of the most famous space figures in pop culture, became a real space traveler in October 2021.
Credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

But the company has aspirations to do much more. He built a lunar lander for NASA, to be named blue moonwhich will perform several unmanned test flights with the New Glenn rocket, before carrying Artemis V astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.

It is also building a commercial space station, called Orbital reef. NASA awarded Blue Origin a The $130 million contract to build as the US space agency tries to transition to a new model of space research, where companies own and operate space laboratories in low Earth orbit and NASA becomes one of its many customers

Just before Friday’s test, the Federal Aviation Administration released Blue Origin a launch license for New Glenn, its final administrative approval. Although the company has not yet announced when it will attempt a liftoff, an FAA operational notice indicates a tentative plan of a launch window that opens at 11:30 pm ET on December 31, with a backup window at the same time on New Year’s Day.

“Well, all that’s left to do is mate our encapsulated payload…and then LAUNCH!” Limp said on X. “Congratulations to the many Blues in today’s test.”

Blue Origin will try to use a sea landing platform, called Jacklyn, to rescue the New Glenn boosters.
Credit: Blue Origin

The license allows Blue Origin to launch New Glenn from the Space Force station at Cape Canaveral, as well as land its reusable booster on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. This sea landing platform, called Jacklynis one of the largest remotely operated ships in the world. The company hopes to be able to reuse a single booster at least 25 times. Reusability is an important facet of the growing commercial space industry, which significantly reduces the cost per launch.

Blue Origin wanted to get to this point months ago. The inaugural flight was scheduled for October, which would have included two Mars orbiters built by Rocket Lab for NASA. If New Glenn had launched then, the twin spacecraft would have taken advantage of the planetary alignment that reduced the travel time to the Red Planet, an average of 140 million kilometers away from Earth.

NASA and Blue Origin are now in discussions for a potential launch for that mission, known as Escapadenot before the spring of 2025.