Cape Canaveral – Blue Origin canceled the inaugural launch of its huge new rocket early Monday morning due to technical problems.
The 98-meter-tall New Glenn rocket was scheduled to lift off before dawn with a prototype satellite from the Cape Canaveral Space Force base in Florida. However, launch controllers had to address an unspecified rocket problem in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time. Once the countdown clock stopped, they immediately began draining all the fuel from the rocket.
Blue Origin did not immediately set a new release date, indicating that the team needed more time to resolve the issue.
The test flight had already been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. It’s five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, which takes paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, created the company 25 years ago. He participated in Monday’s countdown from Mission Control, located at the rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, about 50 miles east of Orlando, Florida.
Whatever happens, Bezos said Sunday night: “We’re going to get up and move forward.”
This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.