Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin calls off maiden launch of new rocket over vehicle issue

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin calls off maiden launch of new rocket over vehicle issue

Blue Origin, the American space company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, called off the first launch of its new rocket early on Monday because of a vehicle issue.

The New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off with a prototype satellite from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

But launch controllers had to deal with an unspecified rocket issue in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time.

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"We’re standing down on today’s launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window," the company wrote in a social media post.

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"We’re reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt".

Once the countdown clock was halted, they immediately began draining all the fuel from the rocket.

Key objective was reaching orbit safely

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 Earth, John Glenn.

It is five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket that carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.

Before the inaugural mission was delayed, Blue Origin said the key objective for the launch was to reach orbit safely.

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"This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely," the company said.

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"Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious - but we’re going for it. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch".

Bezos founded the company 25 years ago and took part in Monday's countdown from Mission Control, located at the rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center about 80 km east of Orlando, Florida.

No matter what happens, Bezos said Sunday evening, "we’re going to pick ourselves up and keep going".