By Chris Forrester SpaceX has delayed the attempted launch of its massive Starship to January 15th with anxieties about the weather off the Texas coast. The Jeff Bezos-backed New Glenn rocket (NG-1) planned launch from Florida in the early hours of January 13th was also scrubbed. The delay to Elon Musk’s giant Starship was made because of bad weather. The New Glenn rocket was also delayed four times by between 20 and 30 minutes each time during the final hours of its countdown on Launch Complex 36. The New Glenn rocket’s launch is crucial for the Blue Origin business. It has already booked a manifest of orders and the plan from Bezos and his team is that it will be a serious competitor to SpaceX. Privately funded by the Bezos cash the rocket is designed to be a workhorse. Its order book is impressive with missions from NASA, AST SpaceMobile and its own Project Kuiper broadband-by-satellite scheme. Like its rivals at SpaceX, the New Glenn rocket has a fully reusable first or booster stage. By reusing this first stage the company will be able to lower the overall costs of similar missions. The Bezos rocket, which stands about as tall as a 30-story building, consists of several parts: The first-stage rocket booster gives the initial thrust at liftoff. Atop the booster is an upper rocket stage that includes a cargo bay protected by a nose cone that will house experimental technology for this mission. However, the January 13th launch was cancelled after five specific delays during the final hours. Downrange weather was uncertain with more time needed to address the – unmentioned – problems. Solving the problems would have taken the mission beyond the launch window. The seventh test flight of a Starship rocket, will see Starship deploy 10 Starlink simulators, similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites as the first exercise of a satellite deploy mission. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space is also planned. Related posts: