By Joey Roulette

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin prepared for the inaugural launch of its New Glenn rocket from Florida early on Monday but extended the mission’s countdown to study an unspecified last-minute issues, as it approaches an important debut in Earth orbit. to enter the satellite launch market.

Standing 30 stories tall, the partially reusable New Glenn launcher sits on Blue Origin’s launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, ready for a liftoff originally scheduled for 1:00 am ET (0600 GMT ) after being loaded with methane and liquid oxygen propellants.

But late in the countdown, Blue Origin pushed back the liftoff time, nearing the end of New Glenn’s 4 a.m. launch window. By 2:20am, a spokeswoman for a live feed company said mission teams were investigating “some anomalies,” without specifying what the issues were.

The mission, the culmination of a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar development journey, will include an attempt to land New Glenn’s first stage booster on a sea-fairing barge in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after to liftoff, while the rocket is in the second stage. continues into orbit.

“The thing we’re most nervous about is the booster landing,” Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, told Reuters in an interview before the launch. “Obviously on a first flight you can have an anomaly at any stage of the mission, so anything can happen.”

Secured inside the payload bay of New Glenn 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.

Getting the spacecraft into its intended orbit on an inaugural rocket launch is a remarkable achievement for a space company.

“If we can do that, that’s a huge achievement,” Bezos said. “Landing the booster will be icing on the cake.”

New Glenn’s development has involved three Blue Origin CEOs and faced several delays as Elon Musk’s SpaceX grew into an industrial juggernaut with the reusable Falcon 9, the most active rocket in the world.

Bezos in late 2023 moved to speed things up at Blue Origin, leading the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Dave Limp, an Amazon (NASDAQ: ) veteran, as CEO, which employees say indicates a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.

The New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and has several customer launch contracts collectively worth billions of dollars lined up.