WASHINGTON — While Blue Origin considers the first flight of its New Glenn rocket a success, the company will have to complete a mishap investigation before its next launch.
New Glenn lifted off on its inaugural launch, called NG-1, Jan. 16 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The second stage reached orbit, although the first stage failed to make a landing on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean as planned.
The payload for the NG-1 mission was Blue Ring Pathfinder, a technology demonstrator for the company’s planned Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle. The payload remained attached to the upper stage, testing communications, power and other systems.
The company says those tests were successful. “Our Blue Ring Pathfinder hit all our mission objectives within the planned six-hour journey after being inserted into the desired orbit by New Glenn with an apogee of 19,300 km and a perigee of 2,400 km at a 30-degree inclination,” Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s chief executive, said in a social media post Jan. 17.
Limp added that the upper stage “nailed insertion with a less than 1% deviation from our exact orbital injection target.” Data from the U.S. Space Force’s Space-Track.org service show the upper stage in an orbit of 2,426 by 19,251 kilometers at an inclination of 29.99 degrees.
Blue Origin has not released any other details about the mission beyond Limp’s post since a press release shortly after the launch. That includes no information about the fate of the first stage, which was headed towards a landing on the company’s landing platform ship, Jacklyn, after stage separation. Telemetry from the first stage, as displayed on the launch webcast, froze at about T+7:55, around the scheduled end of a three-engine reentry burn. The stage was at an altitude of 25,672 meters and traveling at 6,896 kilometers per hour at that point.
The failed landing attempt will require the company to perform a mishap investigation. “The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the Blue Origin NG-1 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, on Jan. 16,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement, referring to the booster landing failure. “The FAA is requiring Blue Origin to perform a mishap investigation.”
Blue Origin will lead the mishap investigation, standard procedure for such reviews, with involvement by the FAA. The agency must approve the final report and any corrective actions before allowing launches to resume.
It’s unclear if that investigation will affect the schedule for upcoming launches of New Glenn. Limp said in a statement immediately after the launch that the company was planning its next launch for the spring, but did not provide a more specific schedule or identify the payload for that launch.
Despite the missed landing, the company won praise for reaching orbit on its first attempt. “Today’s New Glenn test flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station marks a pivotal moment in heavy-lift reusable launch vehicle development,” said Clay Mowry, chief executive of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a former Blue Origin executive, in a Jan. 16 statement. “As the newest heavy-lift rocket, New Glenn is introducing competition to the launch market, helping accelerate the growing space economy by reducing costs, expanding access to space and helping return us to the moon and on to Mars.
“It’s great to see Blue making solid progress toward offering competition to SpaceX and providing customers with additional reusable vehicles capable of carrying large payloads into space,” said Dale Skran, chief operating officer and senior vice president of the National Space Society, a space advocacy group.
However, some have privately criticized the company for choosing to place the upper stage into a high transfer orbit that does not comply with orbital debris mitigation guidelines. While that orbit avoids highly populated regions of low Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit, a breakup could create debris that migrates into those orbits.
