SpaceX Founder Elon Musk comments on Blue Origin New Glenn flight

SpaceX Founder and CEO, Elon Musk has wished luck to Blue Origin before conducting the first New Glenn rocket flight on January 13, 2025. Musk comments “Good Luck” on the New Glenn Flight broadcast on X (formerly Twitter).

SpaceX Founder, Elon Musk wishes luck for the first New Glenn Flight (Credit – X)

As of the time of writing this article, New Glenn continues to add time to the liftoff preparations and checking systems to prepare for the launch with additional vehicle system checks and ground support verification. The rocket maker has not shared the cause for adding additional time to the countdown.

Blue Origin has been preparing for this rocket for years and it has completed all of the pre-flight tests including static fires for both stages and payload fairing encapsulation for Blue Ring Pathfinder.

New Glenn is a 320-foot-tall rocket with two stages including a reusable booster with 7 BE-4 engines, generating 3.8 million pounds of thrust. It is more than Falcon 9 with 9 Merline engines generating more than 1.7 million pounds but below Falcon Heavy, which generates 5 million pounds of thrust.

Blue Origin New Glenn and SpaceX Starship

The vehicle can carry 45 metric tons of payload to orbit, which is twice the Falcon 9 with 22 metric tons.

New Glenn’s first stage is reusable and it can separate and land on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean for the first mission, while the second stage will take the mission into orbit to deploy the payload fairing and payload separation.

SpaceX also has a big rocket test coming as Starship Flight 7 on January 15, which was initially scheduled for January 10 and then forwarded to this date due to bad weather conditions. This was also the situation with the New Glenn, which pushed the launch two days later from an initial date.