Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will have to wait a bit longer to make its long-awaited maiden orbital voyage on its giant New Glenn rocket.
The launch attempt dragged on for hours before being cancelled due to unspecified technical problems, AFP reports.
The 98-metre-tall rocket, named New Glenn in honour of legendary astronaut John Glenn, was scheduled to lift off from the Cape Canaveral military space station during a three-hour window starting at 1:00 a.m. on January 13.
But the countdown repeatedly paused as teams tried to troubleshoot anomalies before the mission was officially "aborted" around 3:10 a.m.
"We're abandoning today's launch attempt to fix a problem with a subsystem on the rocket that will take us beyond the launch window," said Arianne Cornell, Blue Origin's CEO, during a live broadcast watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Cornell added, " We're looking at options for our next launch attempt."
With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire and Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only person in the world richer than him: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market with its Falcon 9 rockets, which are vital to the commercial sector, the Pentagon and NASA.
Bezos, who celebrated his 61st birthday on Jan. 12, watched events unfold from a nearby launch control room. Musk, for his part, wished Blue Origin "Good luck!" at X.
"SpaceX has been pretty much the only player in town for the last few years, so having a competitor is great," said G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official who expects competition to drive down costs.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is planning the next orbital test of Starship - its next-generation rocket - this week. With that, the high-stakes rivalry intensifies. | BGNES
