NEWS WIRES The Blue Origin New Glenn rocket lifts off at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station prior to its scheduled launch on January 16, 2025 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. © Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo, Getty Images via AFP Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time early Thursday, a livestream of the blastoff showed. The rocket, whose inaugural mission had been delayed by several years, blasted of at 2:03 am (0703 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in the US state of Florida, the webcast showed. The mission is seen as critical to Blue Origin's efforts to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX, which dominates the commercial space industry. "LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first ever ascent toward the stars," Blue Origin said on social media platform X. To display this content from X (Twitter), you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept © Gal Roma, Stéphane Koguc, Emmanuelle Michel, AFP Blue Origin will now attempt to land New Glenn's first-stage booster on a drone ship stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has made such landings now routine, but this will be Blue Origin's first shot at the sci-fi feat. High seas last week caused the New Glenn launch to be pushed back several days. Meanwhile, the rocket's upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of roughly 12,000 miles above the surface. A Defense Department-funded prototype of an advanced spaceship called Blue Ring, which could one day journey through the solar system, will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight. Blue Origin has experience landing its New Shepard rockets -- used for suborbital tourism -- but they are five times smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea. Physically, the gleaming white New Glenn dwarfs SpaceX's 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads. Jeff Bezos walks near Blue Origin's New Shepard after flying into space on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. © Joe Raedle via Getti Images North America, AFP It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, capable of carrying the equivalent of 20 moving trucks. Slow vs fast development 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 where Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, "humanity's blue origin." If New Glenn succeeds, it will provide the US government "dissimilar redundancy" -- valuable backup if one system fails, said Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University. (AFP)