Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket lifted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission into space, the first step into Earth orbit for Jeff Bezos’ space company as it seeks to compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch business.

Thirty stories tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2 a.m. ET from the Blue Origin launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines rumbling under cloudy skies on its second takeoff attempt this week.

Hundreds of employees at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Washington, and the rocket plant in Cape Canaveral, Florida, roared with applause as Blue Origin Vice President Ariane Cornell announced that the rocket’s second stage had reached orbit, achieving the long-awaited milestone.

“We’ve achieved our key, critical, No. 1 objective, we’ve reached orbit safely,” Cornell said in the company’s live broadcast. “And everyone, we made it on our first outing.”

The reusable rocket’s first stage was supposed to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the second stage, but failed to make that landing, Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster went black a few minutes after liftoff.

“We actually lost a booster,” Cornell said.

The culmination of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first trip into Earth orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company.

Bezos told Reuters on Sunday, before Blue Origin’s first launch attempt, that he was most nervous about landing the booster.

But he added that holding the landing would be the “icing on the cake” if they were able to achieve the milestone of getting the payload into the intended orbit.

Secured inside New Glenn’s mission payload bay is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.

Rocket’s first launch attempt failed

Monday’s first rocket launch attempt was scrubbed early that morning because of an ice build-up on the propellant tube. On Thursday, the company said there were no pre-launch issues.

Bezos watched the launch from a few kilometers away in the Blue Origin mission control room, wearing large headphones and alongside dozens of launch personnel. He was accompanied by the company’s CEO, Dave Limp.

New Glenn is expected to move forward with a series of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network that will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service.

The New Glenn is the latest U.S. rocket to debut in recent years as governments and private companies ramp up their space programs and race to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its workhorse Falcon 9.

NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket made its successful debut in 2022, as did the Vulcan rocket last year launched jointly by United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful as the Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, with twice the diameter of the payload bay to fit larger batches of satellites. Blue Origin did not disclose the cost of the rocket launch. The Falcon 9 starts at about $62 million.

New Glenn’s development spanned three Blue Origin executives and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industrial powerhouse.

“Congratulations on getting into orbit on your first try!” Musk wrote to Bezos X early Thursday.

SpaceX’s giant next-generation Starship rocket in development, with which New Glenn will also compete, is expected to further shake up the industry with low-cost rides into space and full reusability.

Bezos set out to speed things up at Blue Origin in late 2023, prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He appointed Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, who employees say brought a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.