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Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, could fly its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket by the end of the first week of January, according to an air traffic control advisory. The firm has been testing New Glenn at its facilities at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. As part of these tests, Blue Origin ran a New Glenn hotfire last week and secured a launch license from the FAA that clears the rocket for its first flight. The mission, called Pathfinder, will launch a satellite adapter as part of a demonstration mission for the Space Force. It will also see Blue Origin attempt to vertically recover the first-stage rocket booster like SpaceX's Falcon 9.
Blue Origin's New Glenn Pathfinder Mission Might Launch On January 6th Shows Air Traffic Advisory
Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9, the New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket capable of sending 45,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) or 13,000 kilograms to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). It uses seven BE-4 engines to generate 3.8 million pounds of thrust, more than twice the thrust generated by the Falcon 9. SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket, the Falcon Heavy, pairs three Falcon 9 boosters to generate 5.1 million pounds courtesy of 27 Merlin engines.
Like the Falcon boosters, the New Glenn's first stage is also designed to land vertically on a drone ship. However, unlike the Falcon Heavy, New Glenn is also certified to carry humans to space since Blue Origin is a NASA partner for the Artemis lunar missions, which are expected to land the first astronauts on the Moon since the Apollo program.
Additionally, since it's a heavy-lift rocket, the New Glenn's payload fairing is 7 meters in diameter, which is twice as wide as the Falcon 9 and also larger than the Falcon Heavy's 5.1-meter fairing.
Ahead of the anticipated launch in January, New Glenn's first hotfire successfully lit its seven engines for 24 seconds. A full-duration hotfire is the closest simulation of a rocket launch, meaning that Blue Origin also verified all of the rocket's ground systems and mission control operations as part of the test run.
As for the date of the New Glenn Pathfinder mission, an aerospace advisory on the CANSO ATFM Data Exchange Network for the Americas, or CADENA, website lists January 6th as the primary launch date or January 7th as the backup launch date.
Specifically, it reads:
Primary Launch Day 06 Jan 0600Z-0945Z Backup Launch Day (1) 07 Jan 0600Z-0945Z
To safely launch New Glenn, Blue Origin has also built a 353-foot-tall water tower to push water under the rocket as part of a flame deflector system. Ahead of launch, the firm will mate the rocket's encapsulated payload as part of last-minute pre-flight operations, according to CEO Dave Limp.
After the hotfire, Blue Origin shared that it will use the data from the launch to "to finalize day-of-launch timelines, confirm expected performance, and correlate our models to real-world test data." It added that all seven engines performed nominally and ran at 100% thrust for 13 seconds.
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