Cape Canaveral, Florida. – Blue Origin has the debut launch of its massive new rocket early Monday due to technical difficulties.
The 350-foot New Glenn rocket was scheduled to blast off before dawn with a prototype satellite from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. But the launch controllers encountered an unspecified “subsystem” rocket problem in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time, Blue Origin said in a post on to tap off. of the rocket.
John Raoux/AP
Blue Origin did not immediately set a new launch date as the team needed more time to resolve the issue.
The test flight had already been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. It is five times larger than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket transports paying customers from Texas to the edge of space.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos founded the company 25 years ago. He participated in the countdown Monday from Mission Control, located in the rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, about 50 miles east of Orlando, Florida.
Whatever happens, Bezos said Sunday night, “we’re going to pick ourselves up and keep going.”
