Investing.com — Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has rescheduled its inaugural launch of the New Glenn rocket from Tuesday to Thursday, January 16, according to Reuters.
The company is preparing to compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch market. The first scheduled launch was called off on Monday due to a technical issue encountered before takeoff.
The new three-hour launch window is set to open at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) on Thursday, according to a post by Blue Origin. The development of the New Glenn rocket has seen three different CEOs at the helm of Blue Origin and has faced multiple delays.
In the meantime, SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has become a major player in the industry with its reusable Falcon 9, currently the world’s most active rocket.
The New Glenn rocket is over twice as powerful as the Falcon 9 and already has many customer launch contracts in place, collectively worth billions of dollars.
The plan for the launch is to land the first stage booster of the New Glenn on a sea-faring barge in the Atlantic Ocean, about 10 minutes after liftoff. The rocket’s second stage will continue toward orbit.
In a pre-launch interview on Sunday, Bezos expressed his concerns about the booster landing.
“The thing we’re most nervous about is the booster landing,” he said. “Clearly on a first flight you could have an anomaly at any mission phase, so anything could happen.”
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