🔗 Share this article

The aerospace company, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, had to postpone the highly anticipated liftoff of its powerful launch vehicle on Sunday because of adverse weather factors at Cape Canaveral.

Launch Delay Causes

Rainfall and a technical problem on the ground led to early setbacks, then came cumulus cloud cover as the 88-minute launch window closed, leaving mission controllers to push back the rocket’s planned second mission.

Competition between Bezos' firm and Musk's space company has been heating up in the past few months.

Rescheduled Attempt

To ease traffic in the skies during the government funding gap, the aviation regulator is restricting commercial rocket liftoffs starting Monday.

After scrubbing the launch, the company said late Sunday that, working alongside the FAA, it was targeting a new try as early as Wednesday within a window of afternoon hours EST.

Launch Goals

Upon successful liftoff, the 322-foot New Glenn rocket will carry the US space agency's two Mars-bound probes to Mars, to examine the planet’s climate history with the eventual hope of human exploration.

Blue Origin’s launch will also serve as a key test of its ability to perform booster recovery, which would prove a major advancement for the firm if successful.

Previous Flight

The rocket's first launch in the start of the year was marked as a success, as its payload reached space and successfully performed experiments.

But its main rocket section, which was designed as recoverable, failed to make its landing on a platform in the ocean, and instead was lost during descent.

Recovery Efforts

For this new mission Blue Origin will try once more to land the first stage.

Thus far, only SpaceX has managed that accomplishment.

Industry Competition

The competing companies of billionaires Bezos and Musk are locked in a private sector space competition that has grown more intense lately, as NASA opened up bids for its lunar exploration program, noting that SpaceX was falling behind schedule.

The current administration has seen the administration push NASA to speed up its progress to send a crewed mission to the lunar surface in competition against the Asian nation.

More rivalry between SpaceX and Blue Origin could “give us more choices with regard to launch.”

“More launches means more ideas in space,” a former NASA chief technologist stated. “It isn't a bad thing to have Blue Origin, even not in the lead.”