New Glenn rocket successfully reaches orbit but fails to land booster.

• Early Thursday morning, New Glenn rocket was launched by Blue Origin for the first time from Florida.
• At approximately 2 a.m. ET, the rocket launched without a crew and achieved orbit.
• New Glenn, standing at 30 stories tall, is designed for partial reusability.

On Thursday, Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, launched its towering New Glenn rocket for the first time, marking a crucial milestone.

In the early morning hours in Florida, New Glenn roared off the launchpad and eventually reached orbit, marking its highly anticipated debut mission. Meanwhile, Blue Origin tried to land the rocket's booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, but unfortunately, the booster was lost during reentry through the atmosphere.

The launch is a defining moment for Blue Origin.

Blue Origin, founded 25 years ago, had not yet begun flying to orbit with its smaller New Shepard rocket. However, with the successful flight of New Glenn, the company is entering a market dominated by SpaceX and is crucial to achieving Bezos' larger ambitions.

The New Glenn flight, named in honor of John Glenn, carried a single small test payload into space without anyone on board.

Blue Origin has received orders from NASA's Project Kuiper for at least 12 launches of its internet satellites, as well as plans to launch the Blue Moon lunar and Orbital Reef space station. The company was originally aiming to fly NASA's "ESCAPADE" mission to Mars on New Glenn's debut, but with a dwindling launch window, the agency delayed ESCAPADE to a later launch. Bezos founded Amazon six years before he created Blue Origin.

Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington, has over 10,000 employees across several major locations in the US, including Texas, Florida, and Alabama. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp aims to shift the company's focus from R&D to production, as he previously stated to CNBC.

Blue aims to accelerate the frequency of New Glenn missions, with a goal of conducting 10 launches this year. Despite initial plans for a 2020 launch, the rocket has experienced multiple setbacks.

The mission

The booster, known as "So You're Telling Me There's a Chance," separated from the rocket a few minutes after launch and returned through the atmosphere. It was attempting to land on Blue Origin's barge Jacklyn, which was about 600 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. However, it fell short. The webcast last showed the booster at an altitude of approximately 84,000 feet.

Although New Glenn did not launch any satellites into orbit during the flight, it carried a scaled-down prototype of Blue Ring, an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) that Blue Origin has developed to transport satellites and spacecraft from the launch pad to their intended destinations.

The debut of New Glenn's orbital rocket was marked by several challenges, including technical problems and weather-related delays that spanned multiple days.

The rocket

New Glenn is a 30-story skyscraper standing at 322 feet tall, almost as tall as the Saturn V rockets that carried Apollo missions to the moon, and has a diameter of 23 feet. Blue's rocket is powered by seven BE-4 engines, generating nearly 4 million pounds of thrust, and its nosecone is wide and tall enough to launch three school buses into space at once.

Blue Origin's rocket utilizes liquid oxygen and liquid methane as its power source and is intended for partial reusability, with the goal of launching, landing, and re-launching each booster up to 25 times.

New Glenn, Blue Origin's vehicle, can deliver up to 45,000 kilograms (100,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit per launch, making it fit between SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets in terms of mass delivered to orbit per launch.

Blue Origin has not made public the total cost or pricing per launch of its New Glenn rockets. According to a competitor's estimate, New Glenn costs approximately $70 million per launch.

In the realm of orbital missions, Blue Origin had not yet established itself as a major player in the rocketry industry, with SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Firefly Aerospace currently dominating the U.S. launch market.

Blue Origin has secured a position in the lucrative military launch market through its involvement in the Pentagon's $5.6 billion National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, alongside SpaceX and ULA.

Despite falling behind SpaceX in the industry, Bezos remains optimistic about Blue Origin's future.

Recently, Bezos stated that he believes the business he is currently involved in will be the best he has ever been a part of, but it will take some time to succeed.

Jeff, welcome to the club.