(Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin moved the launch of its New Glenn rocket from Tuesday to Thursday, Jan. 16, further pushing back its inaugural attempt to reach orbit and compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch market.
The company called off its first scheduled launch on Monday after a technical issue was encountered in the lead-up to its takeoff.
The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) on Thursday, Blue Origin said in a post on X.
The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as Elon Musk’s SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut with its reusable Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket.
New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as a Falcon 9 rocket and has dozens of customer launch contracts collectively worth billions of dollars lined up.
The rocket would seek to land New Glenn’s first stage booster on a sea-fairing barge in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after liftoff, while the rocket’s second stage continues toward orbit.
“The thing we’re most nervous about is the booster landing,” Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, told Reuters in a pre-launch interview on Sunday. “Clearly on a first flight you could have an anomaly at any mission phase, so anything could happen.”
(Reporting by Disha Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)
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