Blue Origin pushes back first launch of giant New Glenn rocket

Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin will have to wait a little longer for the long-anticipated maiden orbital flight of its brand-new rocket after a launch attempt dragged on for hours before being cancelled due to unspecified technical issues.

The towering 320-foot (98-metres) rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honour of legendary astronaut John Glenn, was scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a three-hour window starting at 1:00 am local time (0600 GMT) Monday.

But the countdown repeatedly stalled as teams scrambled to resolve anomalies before the mission was officially "scrubbed" around 3:10 am.

"We are standing down today's launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window," said Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin executive, during a livestream watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Cornell added: "We are reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt."

With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, vital for the commercial sector, the Pentagon and NASA.

Bezos, who celebrated his 61st birthday on Sunday, watched events unfold from the nearby launch control room. Musk, for his part, wished Blue Origin "Good luck!" on X.

"SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor... this is great," G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP, expecting the competition to drive down costs.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship -- its gargantuan new-generation rocket -- this week, upping the high-stakes rivalry.

When New Glenn does fly, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first-stage booster on a drone ship named Jacklyn, in honor of Bezos's mother, stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

Though SpaceX has long made such landings a near-routine spectacle, this will be Blue Origin's first shot at a touchdown on the high seas.

Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.

For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals -- United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab -- trail far behind.

Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space. But whereas Musk dreams of colonising Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, "humanity's blue origin."