January 16, 2025 at 11:06 AM Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Thursday. John Raoux/AP Jeff Bezos just scored a huge win: Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit. Now it's Elon Musk's turn; his SpaceX Starship is set to launch for the seventh time later Thursday. The two billionaires are locked in a race to dominate the global space industry. Ahead of the most important moment in Blue Origin's history, Jeff Bezos couldn't help feeling nervous. "I'm worried about everything," the billionaire Amazon founder told Ars Technica's Eric Berger on Sunday, as Blue Origin's technicians prepped the company's 32-story-tall New Glenn rocket for its first launch into orbit. "We've done a lot of work, we've done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight," Bezos said. In the end, he needn't have worried. After a series of delays due to a vehicle subsystem issue, New Glenn finally roared into orbit in the early hours of Thursday, smashing through a barrier many space companies never cross on their first attempt. The launch was a huge milestone for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000. New Glenn heavy-lift rocket at Launch Complex 36 pad at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin It is a big step toward Blue Origin's ambitions of using reusable rockets to regularly carry satellites and NASA astronauts into space, and it proved that the rocket company can go toe-to-toe with its rivals in the new space race. One of those rivals was watching closely. SpaceX founder Elon Musk — who has clashed with Bezos personally — congratulated Blue Origin's founder on the successful launch. The spotlight will now turn to SpaceX, which is set to launch its own mega-rocket Starship for the seventh time just hours after Bezos' company completed the feat for the first time. "This is a great achievement by Blue Origin and it shows the continued strength of private innovation in space," said Chad Anderson, the founder of the VC firm Space Capital and an investor in SpaceX. Anderson told Business Insider that New Glenn would be an important addition to the US's launch capacity, and said that growing competition between launch providers would help drive innovation and prevent the industry from becoming overly reliant on a single provider. However, Anderson said that as impressive as Blue Origin's achievement was, the company was still a step behind rival SpaceX, with Starship expected to be able to carry twice the payload of New Glenn. "Starship will be a complete paradigm shift for the launch industry. It will completely change how we operate in space," he said. SpaceX steps up to the plate