New Glenn during the hotfire test on Dec. 27, 2024. Credit: Blue Origin

A decade in the making, Blue Origin’s moment is finally here.

New Glenn — a 30-story skyscraper-sized rocket, with a fairing large enough to hold three school buses and designed to be reusable from the first launch — is finally about to debut.

The inaugural launch of New Glenn is a turning point in Blue Origin’s history. While its diminutive New Shepard rocket has been taking short hops to space, the grander plans of Jeff Bezos’ company rest on New Glenn flying to orbit — and flying a lot. Blue’s hopes of flying satellites, deploying a space station and reaching the moon rest on the shoulders of New Glenn.

It’s often been convenient to compare SpaceX and Blue Origin, given the dueling interests of their centi-billionaire founders. But it’s never really been a true rivalry. For all intents and purposes, SpaceX has dominated, and much of the space industry with it. 

So this launch is about Blue unlocking a crucial capability. Orbital missions are the industry table stakes of the rocket business, and the industry’s been waiting: New Glenn was supposed to debut as early as 2020. And I still remember being shocked when a source told me, in mid-2021, that New Glenn wouldn’t fly until “2024 or later,” but here we are. Even though Blue missed CEO Dave Limp’s target, the past year’s flurry of work has made it clear how hard the company is pushing to get New Glenn across the line.

This is only the start for New Glenn. Blue leadership is targeting 10 launches this year and even reaching half of that goal would be impressive. And, like most orbital rockets, New Glenn seems destined to evolve, with a company job posting this week indicating that the rocket will undergo a significant jump from seven BE-4 engines to nine. (The company did not respond to my request for comment about which flight they’re targeting for the debut of a nine-engine New Glenn.)

As I’ve written before, the debut of new heavy-lift rockets is an encouraging sign for a market starved of frequently flying alternatives to SpaceX. That means that after debut, cadence is the real mountain to climb. Critically, this will serve as New Glenn’s first national security certification flight, moving closer to tapping lucrative NSSL contracts.

I wonder what the rocket’s astronaut namesake, the legendary late John Glenn, would have said after the launch. But he saw the potential. Shortly before he died, Glenn wrote this to Bezos:

“When I first orbited the earth, in 1962, you were still two years from being born. And when I returned to space, in 1998, Blue Origin was still two years in the future. But you were already driven by a vision of space travel accessible not only to highly trained pilots and engineers and scientists, but to all of us. And you understood that to realize that vision, we would have to be able to get to space more often and more inexpensively."

“As the original Glenn, I can tell you I see the day coming when people will board spacecraft the same way millions of us now board jetliners.”

Michael Sheetz is CNBC’s space reporter – send tips, talent moves and more to michael.sheetz@nbcuni.com.

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