Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ new rocket, which was set to launch on Monday morning in Florida, has been postponed due to vehicle issues.
Bezos’ space company Blue Origin was supposed to launch its New Glenn rocket at 9am GMT but engineers had to call off the launch attempt to “troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue”.
The New Glenn rocket was set for a multi-billion-pound mission to land its first-stage booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean just ten minutes after liftoff, while its second stage aimed to reach Earth’s orbit.
Blue Origin’s vice president of the in-space system, Ariane Cornell, said: “We’re going to assess, as mentioned, what are the things we might want to get done in our downtime. And that is what’s going to guide when the next launch opportunity will be.”
After the launch was called off, the New Glenn rocket was drained of fuel. It remains unclear when another launch attempt will be made.
The launch had already been delayed multiple times with Bezos saying on Sunday evening: “No matter what happens, we’re going to pick ourselves up and keep going”.
The rocket, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, is five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard, which carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.
Bezos, who established Blue Origin 25 years ago in 2000 – two years before Elon Musk’s Space X – joined Monday’s countdown from Mission Control at the rocket factory near NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre.
The rocket is supposed to signal a new phase in the commercial space race and challenge Musk’s dominance in the industry.
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