The tech billionaire has long described a desire to one day move manufacturing and other polluting, “heavy” industries off Earth, leaving our home planet as a sort of national park for humans to visit and enjoy. And to do that, he would need rockets that can carry huge objects. Though New Glenn outpowers the Falcon 9, SpaceX is in the process of developing the groundbreaking flagship of its rocket arsenal. Like Bezos, SpaceX’s Musk has his own concept of our future in space, with humans living and working on other planets, particularly Mars. To help realize that vision, SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed. The nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket dwarfs New Glenn in every sense: Musk has said he hopes Starship will haul up to 300 tons to orbit. This graphic illustrates the comparative sizes of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin's New Glenn and SpaceX's Starship. Ian Berry/CNN SpaceX has billed Starship as a rocket that could make all others obsolete because it aims to drastically reduce the price per kilogram of getting cargo (or people) to space. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, Henry noted. “But I think that if SpaceX continues to lower the cost of access to space, they’ll always be the No. 1 competitor,” Henry said. What’s on board this flight Blue Origin had planned to launch a pair of Mars-bound satellites on behalf of NASA for the first flight of New Glenn. But delays with the rocket’s development prompted the space agency to change course, moving that flight to this spring at the earliest. So for this inaugural flight, Blue Origin opted to instead fly a “demonstrator” that will test technology needed for the company’s proposed Blue Ring spacecraft — which will aim to serve as a sort of in-space rideshare vehicle, dragging satellites deeper into space when needed. The Blue Ring Pathfinder demonstrator (left foreground), is seen with the two halves of the New Glenn rocket's payload fairing, or nose cone (background), on December 9, 2024. The demo will test technology that will be incoporated in Blue Origin's proposed spacecraft called Blue Ring. Courtesy Blue Origin The demonstrator on this New Glenn flight will remain aboard the rocket for the entire six-hour flight, Blue Origin said, and it will validate “communications capabilities from orbit to ground” as well as “test its in-space telemetry, tracking and command hardware, and ground-based radiometric tracking.” The Blue Ring Pathfinder demonstrator is part of a deal Blue Origin inked with the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit. Why Blue Origin wants to reuse rockets Similar to SpaceX, Blue Origin is aiming to recover and refly its first-stage rocket boosters in a bid to make launches less expensive. “Reusability is integral to radically reducing cost-per-launch,” the company said in a recent news release, using the same oft-repeated sentiment that SpaceX has touted since it began landing rocket boosters in 2015. A visualization shows the New Glenn reusable booster returning to Earth and landing on the Jacklyn seafaring platform. Blue Origin Bezos, however, has acknowledged the importance of reusing rocket parts since he founded the company in 2000 — two years before Musk established SpaceX. And the company has already developed its suborbital New Shepard tourism rocket to be reusable. This depicts the satellite-filled sky that is now a reality and getting more crowded every week! This adds together exposures taken over just 30 minutes on an early June night when, from my latitude of 51° N satellites even in low Earth orbit are lit all night by sunlight. Many of the parallel streaks heading generally horizontal west to east (right to left) may be from groups of SpaceX Starlinks. Others traveling vertically north-south are more likely from Earth observation satellites. There is at least one natural streak in the image — a meteor at centre, caught by chance on one frame. It appears as a colored and tapered streak. Other uniform undashed streaks may be from high-altitude satellites moving much more slowly. By comparison, most satellites appear as dashed lines because the image is a blend of many 2-second-long exposures with a gap of one second between exposures when the camera shutter was closed. So the motion of the satellites and image stacking turns them into dashes. The longer the dashes, the faster the satellite is traveling, with the fastest satellites being the lowest. This is looking due south and all the trails disappear low in the south above the trees, as that's where the Earth's shadow is, even on this June night. So the satellites aren't lit when they are in that small part of the sky. They emerge from the shadow heading north and disappear into the shadow heading south. The shadow creates the obvious boundary of where satellite trails are visible. At other times of the year low-orbit satellites are visible only after sunset or before sunrise, especially from lower latitudes. But not near summer solstice, and from higher latitudes. The field of view is about 100° by 75°. (Photo by: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Related article What is ‘Kessler Syndrome’ — and why do some scientists think the space disaster scenario has already started?