Sawt Falasteen - Blue Origin eyes early Tuesday launch but weather an issue

The inaugural launch of the towering 320-foot (98-meter) rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honor of legendary American astronaut John Glenn, had been initially scheduled during a three-hour window starting at 1:00 am (0600 GMT) Monday.

After repeated stalls in the countdown, the launch was ultimately called off, with the company later saying it had discovered an issue related to "ice forming in a purge line on an auxiliary power unit" for some hydraulic systems.

Blue Origin said it would aim for another three-hour window beginning at 1:00 am Tuesday, but warned "poor weather forecast at LC-36" -- its launch site at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida -- "could result in missing this window."

With the mission, dubbed NG-1, Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: fellow tech innovator Elon Musk.

Musk's company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, which have become vital for the commercial sector, Pentagon and NASA.

Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000 and celebrated his 61st birthday Sunday, watched Monday's events unfold from the nearby launch control room.

Musk, for his part, wished Blue Origin "Good luck!" on X.

"SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor... this is great," G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.

Upping the high-stakes rivalry, SpaceX plans another orbital test of Starship -- its gargantuan new-generation rocket -- later this week.

- Landing attempt -

When New Glenn does fly, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first-stage booster on a drone ship stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

SpaceX has made such landings now routine, but this will be Blue Origin's first shot at a touchdown on the high seas.

Meanwhile, the rocket's upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of roughly 12,000 miles above the surface.

A Defense Department-funded prototype of an advanced spaceship called Blue Ring, which could one day journey through the solar system, will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight.

Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets -- used for suborbital tourism -- but they are five times smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.

Physically, the gleaming white New Glenn dwarfs SpaceX's 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.

It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks.

- Slow v fast development -

Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.

For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals -- United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab -- trail far behind.

Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space.

But where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, "humanity's blue origin."

If New Glenn succeeds, it will provide the US government "dissimilar redundancy" -- valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University.

Z.Ramadan--SF-PST