New Glenn Slips One Day Due to Weather

Word broke this afternoon that the Maiden Flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn has been postponed another day due to weather.  Not the weather here on the Cape but down range where the recovery ship is positioned to attempt to recover the booster. 

Instead of Sunday morning at 1:00 AM EST, the target date is now Monday morning at the same time. There's a three hour launch window, and Blue Origin will provide a webcast at this link starting one hour before liftoff.

Of course that means that recovering the booster is a goal for this mission, so it's not just the first attempt to achieve orbit, it's a test flight of the first prototype of their Blue Ring programmable upper stage, and a test of landing the booster at sea. 

"Our objective is to reach orbit," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said this week. "Anything beyond that is a bonus. Landing our booster offshore is ambitious—but we’re going for it. No matter what, we will learn a lot."

As an aside, that's the closest thing to the regular SpaceX line "the only thing guaranteed is excitement" that I've ever heard associated with Blue Origin. 

In contrast with SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rockets tend to finish fueling about two minutes before liftoff, New Glenn is expected to be completely fueled an hour before launch. The first fueling operation, the second stage's liquid hydrogen loading, will begin 4.5 hours before liftoff or 8:30 PM EST.

During a nominal mission the booster stage's seven BE-4 engines—which have previously performed well during two flights of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket—will burn liquid methane for 3 minutes and 10 seconds. If all goes well with this booster stage after separation from the second stage, it will initiate a 28-second burn to make a controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, followed by a landing burn before touching down at 9 minutes and 28 seconds into the flight.

As with many other launch vehicles, the second stage is going to do two burns in the first hour of the mission.  Blue Origin provided this mission profile, but that's not apparent from this graphic.

Mission Profile for this flight. Image credit: Blue Origin

More in a first mission than even something like Starship's Flight Test 7, it's always possible that something could go wrong with the booster or upper stage in flight, or even both.  As CEO Dave Limp outlined, it's an ambitious first flight, and we wish them luck.