Blue Origin has launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of kilometres above earth.
Named after the first American to orbit earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early on Thursday, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA's Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.
Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 98-metre rocket carried an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits.
New Glenn has passed the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space!— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) January 16, 2025
Company employees erupted in cheers and frenzied applause once the craft successfully reached orbit.
For this test, the satellite was expected to remain inside the second stage while circling earth.
The mission was expected to last six hours, with the second stage then placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA's practices for minimising space junk.
The first-stage booster missed its landing on a barge in the Atlantic minutes after lift-off so it could be recycled, but the company stressed the main objective was for the test satellite to reach orbit.
New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice build-up in critical plumbing caused a delay.
The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.
Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself.
The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard.
New Glenn, which honours John Glenn, is five times taller.
Bezos - taking part in the launch from Mission Control on Cape Canaveral - said he did not see Blue Origin in a competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator.
Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights in 2025, with the next one coming up this spring.
"There's room for lots of winners" Bezos said from the rocket factory at the weekend, adding this was the "very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we're all going to work together as an industry ... to lower the cost of access to space".
New Glenn is the latest big, new rocket to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance's Vulcan, Europe's upgraded Ariane 6 and NASA's Space Launch System or SLS, the space agency's successor to the Saturn V for sending astronauts to the moon.
The biggest rocket of all, at 123m, is SpaceX's Starship.
Musk said the seventh test flight of the full rocket could occur later on Thursday from Texas.
He hopes to repeat what he pulled off in October, catching the returning booster at the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.
Starship is what NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the moon later this decade.