The aerospace company, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was forced to postpone the highly anticipated launch of its powerful launch vehicle on Sunday due to unfavorable meteorological factors at the Florida launch site.
Mission Postponement Reasons
Rainfall and a ground system issue caused early setbacks, followed by cumulus cloud cover as the 88-minute launch window closed, leaving mission controllers to push back the vehicle's upcoming flight.
Competition between Bezos' firm and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been intensifying in the past few months.
New Launch Window
To ease airspace congestion amid the government funding gap, the aviation regulator is restricting commercial rocket liftoffs from the beginning of the week.
After scrubbing the mission, Blue Origin said late Sunday that, in coordination with the regulatory body, it was targeting a new try as early as Wednesday within a time slot of afternoon hours EST.
Mission Objectives
Upon successful liftoff, the 322-foot tall launch vehicle will transport the US space agency's Escapade twin spacecraft to the Red Planet, to study the planet’s climate history with the eventual hope of human exploration.
Blue Origin’s launch will also act as a key test of whether it can achieve reusable rocket landing, which would represent a technical breakthrough for the company if successful.
Earlier Mission
The rocket's first launch in January was marked as a achievement, as its cargo reached space and successfully performed experiments.
But its first-stage booster, which was meant to be recoverable, failed to make its landing on a platform in the ocean, and ended up destroyed during the return phase.
Recovery Efforts
For this new mission the launch provider will make another attempt to recover the booster stage.
Thus far, only Musk’s company SpaceX has managed that feat.
Industry Competition
The competing companies of billionaires Bezos and Musk are engaged in a commercial space race that recently escalated, as the space agency began accepting bids for its planned moon mission, noting that SpaceX was falling behind schedule.
The current administration has seen the administration pile pressure on NASA to accelerate its progress to launch astronauts to the lunar surface amid a race with the Asian nation.
More rivalry between SpaceX and Blue Origin could “expand our options with regard to launch.”
“More launches means greater innovation in space,” a former NASA chief technologist stated. “It isn't a bad thing to have Blue Origin, even not in the lead.”
