By Joey Roulette
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is set for an inaugural launch of its giant New Glenn rocket on Sunday, a long-awaited first leap to Earth orbit that sets up one of the biggest challenges yet to industry dominance enjoyed by Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Standing 30 stories tall, New Glenn has been a core focus for Blue Origin since the beginning of its decade-long development, representing a multibillion-dollar effort to sate demand for satellite constellation launches and snatch market share from SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9.
If successful in its debut, New Glenn can later start launching Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)'s broadband internet satellite constellation, Kuiper, that will rival SpaceX's Starlink network, accelerating competition on another front.
Blue Origin for years has launched and landed its much smaller, reusable New Shepard rocket to and from the brim of Earth's atmosphere. It has yet to send anything into orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company to have "millions of people working and living in space."
That could change this week, but with new rockets, success is not guaranteed.
New Glenn is scheduled to launch at 1 am ET (0600 GMT) on Sunday from the company's launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending to orbit its first Blue Ring satellite - a maneuverable spacecraft designed for satellite servicing and national security missions in space.
Compared with SpaceX's Falcon 9, the world's most active rocket, New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful with a payload bay diameter two times larger to fit bigger batches of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the rocket's launch pricing. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.
New Glenn, however, would not be as powerful as SpaceX's next-generation Starship, a fully reusable rocket system in development that Musk sees as crucial to expanding Starlink's footprint in orbit. Starship in its next test flight this month will attempt to deploy mock satellites.
'FOUND A SWEET SPOT'
There are dozens of launches and hundreds of millions of dollars sitting on New Glenn's docket. Blue Origin has booked multi-launch deals with Eutelsat's OneWeb, Canada's Telesat and satellite-to-cellular device company AST SpaceMobile.
"New Glenn has found a sweet spot that has enabled them to get more customers than anyone else right now," said Caleb Henry, a satellite and launch analyst at Quilty Analytics, of the space company's potential in satellite constellations.
SpaceX's Falcon 9, which ignited the industry's reusability trend for its cost savings potential, made early landing attempts of the rocket's core stage by returning it to the ocean during development a decade ago, before attempting touchdowns on drone ships.
New Glenn's reusable core stage will make its first landing attempt on a drone ship a few minutes after liftoff.
New Glenn's rocky development has spanned three CEOs and at times slowed as Blue Origin took on other ambitious projects, such as building a moon lander for NASA.
As much of the Western world grew reliant on SpaceX for accessing space, Bezos in late 2023 sought to jolt New Glenn out of development paralysis by replacing Blue Origin's CEO with Dave Limp, a deputy from Amazon's devices unit, to speed things up.
Blue Origin engineers have felt the urgency from the top, according to multiple employees.
"We've never had the entire company fully focused on one thing so aggressively like this before," one Blue Origin employee said. "For all of the last year it's basically been everyone's mission every day to get to this first launch."
New Glenn also would compete with the less-powerful Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Lockheed that is planning a stronger Vulcan variant in the future.
The Sunday launch is also a key certification flight required by the U.S. Space Force before New Glenn can launch national security payloads on missions it hopes to win in a multibillion-dollar procurement competition due for award later this year.