On Thursday morning, at a time when most people in the United States were sleeping, Jeff Bezos’ space company sent its first rocket into orbit.
At 2:03 a.m. Eastern time, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night into day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, nudged upward and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the color of combustion of the rocket’s methane fuel.
Thirteen minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit.
The launch was a major success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos’ rocket company. It should quiet critics who say that the company has been too slow compared with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has dominated global spaceflight industry in recent years. New Glenn could prove a credible competitor with Mr. Musk’s company and win launch contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense, as well as commercial contracts.
For at least one moment, however, the two richest people in the world warmly cheered each other.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt!” Mr. Musk wrote on X, the social media site that he owns.
“Thank you!” Mr. Bezos replied.
Mr. Bezos posted a series of pictures and videos. “Beautiful,” Mr. Musk commented on one of the images.
The upward flight appeared almost flawless, but Blue Origin’s stretch goal of landing the booster stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean failed. As planned, the booster fired three of its engines to slow down, but then the stream of data stopped, indicating that the booster had been lost.
“We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring,” Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a statement.
For years, Mr. Bezos has talked of an ambitious vision of millions of people working and living in space, sending spacecraft to the moon and building space stations. Skeptics, however, pointed out that Blue Origin had not sent a single thing to orbit since the company was founded nearly a quarter-century ago, two years before SpaceX.
Now it has.
“There was reason to doubt before this launch if Blue Origin actually had the technical capability,” said Todd Harrison, a space policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. “And now they’ve proven that they do.”
Until now, Blue Origin had launched only its smaller New Shepard rocket, which sent space tourists and science experiments on suborbital jaunts to the edge of space, providing a few minutes of floating. Mr. Bezos was among the first passengers on a New Shepard flight in 2021.
New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the first American to orbit Earth, dwarfs New Shepard. Indeed, a New Shepard could fit within New Glenn’s payload area in the nose cone. Reaching the speed to circle the Earth is a much more complex task than the New Shepard vehicle has achieved.
“All of the sudden, you’ve graduated to a new level of credibility,” said Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at BryceTech, a consulting firm in Alexandria, Va.
When Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, he said it would be ready by the end of 2020. A huge Blue Origin rocket factory rose just outside NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but there were scant signs of the rocket itself. The original target date came and went.
Blue Origin was selected to launch a NASA mission — ESCAPADE, which is to take measurements of the Martian atmosphere — in October last year. But NASA pulled the spacecraft off the inaugural flight when it became uncertain that Blue Origin could be ready in time.
Instead, this launch took to orbit a prototype of Blue Ring, a vehicle that could move satellites around in Earth orbit. For this flight, the prototype — Blue Origin calls it a “pathfinder” — remained attached to the rocket’s second stage testing the communication, power and flight computer systems.
Blue Origin says that in the future Blue Ring will be able to move payloads between very different orbits, including those that go out as far as the moon and perform a variety of tasks.
The Blue Ring prototype worked as expected during the six-hour mission, Blue Origin said.
Blue Origin still lags far behind SpaceX in accomplishments — Mr. Musk’s company launched more than 100 times last year. But New Glenn could offer long-awaited competition for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which currently dominate the launch industry.
”The only remaining question, I think, is how fast they can ramp up the launch rate,” Mr. Harrison said.
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Limp said that, with a successful inaugural launch of New Glenn, Blue Origin is aiming for a second launch in the spring and that he wanted six to eight launches this year.
“That would be a good year for us, I think,” he said.
“Jeff would like us to do more, so we’re pushing,” Mr. Limp added, referring to Mr. Bezos, who was sitting next to him.
“That’s very realistic,” Mr. Bezos said.
One of Blue Origin’s contracts is with Mr. Bezos’ other company, Amazon, to launch satellites for Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites. It will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink system.
Blue Origin officials have not yet announced what will be going up this year, but the launches could include an uncrewed moon lander. Blue Origin is working on a spacecraft that is to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon a few years from now.
During an interview last year on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” a Blue Origin official revealed that the company was developing a small lunar lander that it called Blue Moon Mark 1, scheduled to launch to the moon in 2025.
Mr. Limp said that was still the plan, and the spacecraft is currently under construction.
A full-scale model of the Mark 1 lander dominates the lobby of the Blue Origin building in Florida.
“It’s supposed to go this year,” Mr. Bezos said. “I think it will go this year.”