Blue Origin's giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida on its first mission to space, an inaugural step into Earth's orbit for Jeff Bezos' space company as it aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.
Thirty storeys tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2am local time (7am Irish time) from Blue Origin's launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Its seven BE-4 engines thundered for miles under cloudy skies on its second lift-off attempt this week.
Hundreds of employees at the company's headquarters in Kent, Washington, and at its rocket factory in Cape Canaveral, Florida, erupted with applause as Blue Origin VP Ariane Cornell announced the rocket's second stage made it to orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone and the mission's primary objective.
"We hit our key, critical, number one objective, we got to orbit safely," Ms Cornell said on a company livestream. "And y'all we did it on our first go."
Blue Origin said in a statement after the mission that New Glenn's payload, an in-house test satellite, "is receiving data and performing well".
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The rocket's reusable first stage booster was due to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage but failed to make that landing, Ms Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster blacked out minutes after lift-off.
"We did in fact lose the booster," she explained. Blue Origin did not explain why or by how much the booster missed its landing.
The culmination of a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar development journey, the mission had once been due for launch in 2020 but engineering challenges caused years of delay.
Mr Bezos said that he was most nervous about landing the booster before Blue Origin's first launch attempt.
However, he added that sticking the landing would be the "icing on the cake" if they could achieve the milestone of getting the payload to its intended orbit.
Secured inside New Glenn's payload bay for the mission was the first prototype of Blue Origin's Blue Ring vehicle, a manoeuvrable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.
Today's mission sets up New Glenn's next planned flight in spring, Blue Origin's CEO Dave Limp said in a statement.
The company is likely to start an engineering investigation into the cause of the booster landing failure, potentially holding up progress to the next mission.
Blue Origin has several boosters in production at its Cape Canaveral rocket factory. The rocket's first attempt to launch last Monday was scrubbed around 8am Irish time because ice had accumulated on a propellant line.
However, today, the company cited no issues ahead of launch.
Mr Bezos monitored the launch from a few miles away in Blue Origin's mission control room, wearing a large headset and flanked by dozens of launch staff. Mr Limp was at a computer next to him.
New Glenn is expected to press ahead with a backlog of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon's Kuiper satellite internet network that will rival SpaceX's Starlin service.
It is the latest US rocket to debut in recent years as governments and private companies beef up their space programmes and race to challenge Elon Musk's SpaceX and its workhorse Falcon 9.
NASA's giant Space Launch System rocket had a successful debut in 2022, as did the Vulcan rocket last year from United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin's joint launch venture.
New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful as Falcon 9, the world's most active rocket, 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 (€60m).
The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut.
SpaceX's giant, next-generation Starship rocket in development, which New Glenn will also compete with, is expected to further rattle the industry with cheap rides to space and full reusability.
In late 2023, Mr Bezos moved to speed things up at Blue Origin, prioritising the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines.
He named Mr Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, who employees say introduced a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.
