• Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, has launched its first orbital rocket, New Glenn.
• New Glenn is one of the largest, most powerful rockets ever built.
• The maiden launch marks a milestone for Blue Origin.

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin has entered the rocket big leagues.

At 2:03 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Blue Origin's 32-story-tall New Glenn rocket fired its seven engines and climbed atop a cloud of fire and steam for the first time, roaring into the skies above the launch complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"LIFTOFF! New Glenn is beginning its first ever ascent toward the stars," Blue Origin wrote in an X post on Thursday morning.

New Glenn belongs to a new generation of the largest, most powerful rockets ever built, next to Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starship and NASA's new moon rocket, the Space Launch System.

These heavy-lift vehicles have roughly the size and heft of NASA's Saturn V — the rocket that launched Apollo astronauts to the moon — but they're designed for even more ambitious goals.

Musk and Bezos have espoused plans to establish permanent human settlements on Mars and on a giant space station, respectively. NASA aims to build permanent science stations on and around the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars with SpaceX's and Blue Origins' help.

First, though, Blue Origin needs to strengthen its business. New Glenn's maiden launch positions the company to fly payloads to orbit and challenge SpaceX's dominance.

Blue Origin was originally planning to launch New Glenn on Monday. The launch was repeatedly delayed and eventually postponed after Blue Origin said they had to "troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue."

Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Blue Origin loses booster in an otherwise successful launch

Blue Origin, however, lost its booster after it separated from the rocket. The booster was meant to return to Earth and land on a platform, which would have been the company's first step to proving the reusability of their booster.

This makes SpaceX the only company to have recovered and reused a rocket's booster stages. The Elon Musk-led rocket company has been retrieving its much smaller Falcon 9 first-stage boosters for reuse in this way for years.

SpaceX's Starship booster recently proved a different landing method, lowering itself into the waiting arms of a landing tower in October.

Like Falcon 9, and unlike Starship, New Glenn is only partially reusable — its second stage is not designed for reuse.

Blue Origin's future depends on New Glenn

Trailing behind SpaceX, Blue Origin is one of the leading companies paving the way for reusable rockets, which can help slash spaceflight costs.

Weeks before New Glenn's debut launch, during the New York Times 2024 DealBook Summit, Bezos said Blue Origin "is not a very good business, yet."

He added, "It's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in."

New Glenn is Blue Origin's second rocket, but its first designed to insert itself into Earth's orbit.

The company began construction on New Glenn in 2016. Bezos has said he isn't happy with the company's speed of progress.

"Blue Origin needs to be much faster," Bezos told Lex Fridman in December 2023. "And it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago."

For comparison, SpaceX began developing its first orbital rocket, the Falcon 9 v1.0, in 2005. It made its debut launch five years later, in 2010.

That said, New Glenn is more than three times more powerful than SpaceX's first Falcon 9.

Blue Origin's comparatively tiny New Shepard rocket, which carries paying customers and other payloads to suborbital space, has been reused nearly 30 times since its first launch in 2015.

New Glenn's maiden voyage is carrying a test payload

As Blue Origin's barge sails the booster back to the coast, the rocket's second stage is scheduled to remain in space for about six hours while carrying the company's prototype Blue Ring pathfinder spacecraft.

Blue Ring is designed for multiple mission types, including transporting, refueling, and communicating with other craft in space. The pathfinder prototype launched on Thursday is a test launch and is set to remain onboard and not be deployed into space.

"There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp wrote on X in December. Blue Ring is designed to fulfill that need for both government and commercial customers, Limp said.

The Federal Aviation Administration has granted Blue Origin a license to launch New Glenn to orbit from Cape Canaveral for the next five years.

Blue Origin's customers include NASA, Amazon, and several telecommunications providers.

• The Palisades and Eaton fires have razed thousands of homes and burned tens of thousands of acres.
• Some buildings have survived, though, like the Getty Villa art museum in Pacific Palisades.
• The Villa is not your average home, but homeowners can learn from what Getty staff have been doing all year.

As the Palisades and Eaton fires burned through thousands of acres on Tuesday, razing nearly 2,000 homes, the iconic Getty Villa remained standing with minor damage. Meanwhile, homes and trees around it went up in flames.

"We deeply appreciate the tireless work and dedication of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and other agencies," the museum said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The Getty Villa is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which includes the largest endowment of any museum in the world, estimated at more than $8 billion in 2023. It houses the trust's collection of Ancient Greek and Roman art.

Fire departments used "state-of-the-art air handling systems" to help protect the building, Katherine E. Fleming, the president and CEO of the Getty Trust, told USA Today.

Moreover, builders designed the galleries with double-walled construction, which also helped protect the precious art inside.

However, it wasn't just expensive architecture and state-of-the-art firefighting that helped. Getty staff have been consistently clearing brush from the surrounding area all year as part of its fire-mitigation efforts, the museum said.

That's a crucial lesson for homeowners in fire-risk areas.

Yard work to save your home

The Palisades fire has become the most destructive ever to hit Los Angeles, CNN reported, citing CalFire data.

The fire has been fueled by an explosion of grasses and brush that grew abundant over the past two winters, which were rainier than usual. But with drought conditions over the past few months, that brush dried out, becoming kindling for the fast-moving blazes.

To mitigate the risk of fire, cities, fire departments, and community members can clear dried grasslands around residential areas.

Individual homeowners can also protect their properties by clearing a 5-foot perimeter around their houses and removing flammable materials like ornamental plants, bark mulch, or deck furniture.

"This is an urban fire. We're burning urban fuels," said Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience.

Keeping gutters and roofs clear can also prevent spot ignitions that can send entire structures up in flames.

"People believe that they're helpless," Durland told Business Insider in 2023. But that's not the case, he said. "Nine out of 10 times, this boils down to two words: yard work."

Homeowners can also install noncombustible, 1/8-inch mesh screening on any vents to a crawl space or attic to prevent embers from entering the home that way.

"You are where the rubber meets the road. The things you do on your house and around your house are going to make the difference," Durland said.

• Kenyan officials are investigating who owns a mysterious metallic object that fell from the sky.
• The giant ring fell from space, crash-landing into Mukuku Village in Kenya on Wednesday.
• No one was hurt, but space debris poses a serious threat to life on Earth and in space.

On Wednesday, Mukuku Village in Kenya got an unexpected visitor from space.

At about 3 p.m. local time, a large metallic ring weighing about 1,100 pounds and measuring 8 feet in diameter crash-landed in the village, the Kenya Space Agency said in a statement.

The agency said no one was injured, and that the space debris poses no immediate risk.

Maj. Alois Were, an officer with the Kenya Space Agency, told Citizen TV, a Kenyan news station, that the ring-like object is "possibly from a rocket separation stage."

However, it's unclear whose rocket the ring might belong to. Officials said they had collected pieces from the impact site for further analysis to determine its origins.

Were said that once they determine the owner, the space agency will use the "existing legal mechanisms under international law" to hold the person or organization accountable.

Space debris is usually designed to either burn up in Earth's atmosphere before reaching the ground or land in unpopulated areas, like the ocean. This doesn't always happen, though.

For example, in May 2024, a piece of SpaceX debris as large as a car hood crash-landed on a trail at a mountaintop resort just outside Asheville, North Carolina.

If it had landed on a person hiking the trail that day, it would have certainly killed them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leading space debris expert, told Business Insider in July.

To date, no one has died from space debris raining from the skies. Perhaps the closest call was in March, when a two-pound piece of debris slightly smaller than a soda can fell from the International Space Station, crashing through a family's roof in Florida. The family is suing NASA over the incident.

Ever since humans started launching objects into space in the late 1950s, there has been a risk that some might fall back to Earth in an unexpected place. As humans launch more objects into space, however, that risk is growing.

Between 2008 and 2017, global space organizations launched an average of 82 orbital rockets a year. That number jumped to an average of about 130 launches a year between 2018 and 2022, according to the US International Trade Commission. In 2024, there were about 250 launches — a new record.

This poses risks on Earth and adds to a long-existing problem in space: space clutter and collisions. There's a lot of trash in space, from dead satellites and astronaut gloves to tiny bits no larger than a grape.

These millions of bits of debris are racing around our planet faster than a bullet. It's gotten so bad that about 1,000 warnings of possible impending collisions are issued daily to satellite operators, physicist Thomas Berger said in a press briefing at December's annual American Geophysical Union meeting.

Berger said a major collision could generate "an unstoppable chain reaction of further collisions, ultimately resulting in a completely filled-up space environment."

If that happens, it could make space unusable.