Watch Bezos’ new rocket fire up its engines. It’s about to be launched.

In the ongoing saga of billionaires and giant rockets comes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his latest space car, New Glenn.

The rocket, which stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, is named after her NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first person to orbit the Earth in 1962. Although he is much shorter than SpaceXis high A starit is about the size of NASA’s mega moon rocket, i Space Launch System.

Years in the making, the commercial rocket is close to its first flight.

On Friday, while tightly strapped to the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, New Glenn nailed its final coat of arms, firing all seven engines for 24 seconds. It was the first time that Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, used all packaged rockets as an integrated system. Flashes from the engines pierced through the steam, like lightning cracks through storm clouds.

“The next launch,” Bezos said in a post on X, a social media platform owned by his space launch rival, Elon Musk. Despite their competition, Musk responded with a wish for godspeed.

The Tweet may have been deleted

A video of the test, called hot fire, can be viewed in the post above. The show involved a full fuel count and practice. The New Glenn’s booster runs on methane and liquid oxygen, while the second stage of the rocket, which propels the spacecraft into space, runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

When all seven booster engines fire in concert, they generate enough power for two Nimitz aircraft carriers at full tilt, said David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. For 13 seconds of the hot-fire test, the New Glenn was operating at 100 percent of its thrust capacity.

Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000, but its first small rocket, the New Shepard, is more focused on space tourism, providing short flights wealthy passengers to the end of space and beyond.

But the company has ambitions to do more. NASA built a lunar habitat, to be named Green Moonwhich will make several test flights with the New Glenn rocket, before transporting the Artemis V astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.

It also built a commercial space station, called Orbital Reef. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $130 million contract building it as the US space agency tries to move to a new model of space research, where businesses own and operate space labs in low-Earth orbit and NASA becomes one of their many customers.

Just before Friday’s test, the Federal Aviation Administration released Blue Origin a activation license of New Glenn, its final administrative approval. Although the company has not announced when it will try to remove it, the FAA is issuing operational advisories. test program opening launch window at 11:30 pm ET on Dec. 31, with a backup window at the same time on New Year’s Day.

“Well, all that’s left for us to do is add up our income…and then LAUNCH!” Limp said in X. “Congratulations to many Blue people on today’s test.”

Blue Origin will try to use a sea-based landing platform, called Jacklyn, to save the New Glenn boosters.
Credit: Blue Origin

The license allows Blue Origin to launch the New Glenn from the Space Force station at Cape Canaveral, and its reusable booster on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. That sea-based landing scene, named Jacklynis one of the largest remotely operated ships in the world. The company hopes to be able to reuse a single booster at least 25 times. Reusability is a key feature of the growing commercial industry, significantly reducing the cost of each launch.

Blue Origin wanted to get to this point months ago. The first flight was scheduled for October, which would include it two Mars orbiters built for NASA’s Rocket Lab. If New Glenn had launched at that time, the double spacecraft would have taken advantage of the planet’s configuration to shorten the travel time to the Red Planet, which is an average of 140 million kilometers from Earth.

NASA and Blue Origin are now in talks for a possible launch of that mission, known as Escapadebefore spring 2025.