Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin will have to wait a little longer for the long-anticipated maiden orbital flight of its brand-new rocket after a launch attempt dragged on for hours before being cancelled due to unspecified technical issues.
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The towering 98-metre (320-foot) rocket, dubbed New Glenn in honour of legendary astronaut John Glenn, was scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a three-hour window starting at 1:00am on Monday.
But the countdown repeatedly stalled as teams scrambled to resolve anomalies, before the mission was officially “scrubbed” around 3:10am.
“We are standing down today’s launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window,” said Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin executive, during a live streaming watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Cornell added: “We are reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt.”
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With the mission, dubbed NG-1, billionaire Amazon founder Bezos is taking aim at the only man in the world wealthier than him: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its prolific Falcon 9 rockets, vital for the commercial sector, the Pentagon and Nasa.