Cape Canaveral, Florida. — Blue Origin has canceled the first launch of its massive new rocket early Monday due to technical issues.
The 320-foot New Glenn rocket was supposed to lift off before dawn with a prototype satellite from the Cape Canaveral space station in Florida. But launch controllers faced an unspecified rocket “subsystem” problem in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time. Blue Origin said in a post on. Once the countdown stopped, they immediately began draining all the fuel from the rocket.
John Raoux / AP
Blue Origin did not immediately set a new launch date, saying 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 is five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket which transports paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos founded the company 25 years ago. He participated in Monday’s countdown from Mission Control, located in 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 evening, “we’re going to get back up and keep going.”