Blue Origin cancels second launch of New Glenn due to weather and cruise ship traffic

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has canceled the second launch of its massive New Glenn rocket scheduled for Sunday afternoon due to weather concerns, some minor issues with launch pad equipment, and at least one cruise ship that veered too close to the flight path.

It is not immediately clear when the company will make another attempt to launch a second New Glenn mission. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced restrictions on space launches late last week due to the government shutdown. On November 7, Blue Origin posted on X that the company is working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ensure a launch on Sunday It could happen. After Sunday’s launch session, the company said it was “reviewing opportunities for the next launch attempt based on forecast weather.”

This mission is important to Blue Origin for a number of reasons.

For one thing, the company is still proving the rocket’s full reusability. New Glenn successfully reached orbit during its first launch in January, but the rocket exploded before it could land on a drone ship in the ocean. Blue Origin hopes to land the booster rocket for the first time during this second flight.

This is also New Glenn’s first commercial mission. The rocket will carry NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft into space, where it will begin a mission to Mars. New Glenn also carries a technology demonstrator for Viasat, part of another NASA project. Proving that New Glenn can deliver payloads into space safely — and do so at low cost thanks to the largely reusability of the rockets — is crucial if Blue Origin wants to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Blue Origin originally planned to attempt a second launch earlier this year, however Delayed several times. The launch window on Sunday at Cape Canaveral, Florida, initially opened at 2:45 p.m. local time, and the company had a roughly 90-minute window. Weather concerns and launch pad equipment issues caused the launch time to be delayed several times.

As the clock started again just minutes before the launch attempt, a cruise ship entered the flight path, according to the broadcast. While that ship was expected to be evacuated before 4:15pm when the launch window closed, the weather was still a concern, prompting the company to cancel the attempt.