• Lauren Sánchez launched to the edge of space on a Blue Origin rocket Monday morning.
• It's the first all-female crew since 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.
• Sánchez said she was "so proud of this crew" for their bravery.

Jeff Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sánchez made history on Monday, becoming part of the first all-female crew to launch toward space in the 21st century. The last time was in 1963 when cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn joined Sánchez on the flight.

"It was a feeling of joy and camaraderie. It was a feeling of gratefulness. It was a feeling that we're doing this," Sánchez said shortly after returning to Earth.

The journalist and helicopter pilot rode Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, which takes space tourists to 62 miles above Earth's surface — to the Kármán line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between space and our planet.

The rocket is named after the NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who conducted a similar, brief suborbital flight to become the first American in space in 1961.

"Alan Shepard did this same exact flight and he became the first American in space, and six women just did the same flight," Sánchez said.

'More connected than you realize'

The six women experienced weightlessness for about three minutes before falling back to Earth. Looking out of the rocket's windows in those few moments of zero-G, Sánchez said she felt connected.

"Earth looked so, it was so quiet," she said adding that, "You look at it and you're like — we're all in this together. That's all I could think about, like, we're so connected, more connected than you realize."

Astronauts have long described similar, overwhelming feelings of awe, unity, and appreciation for Earth's fragility as they gaze down on our planet from space. They call it "the overview effect."

Shepard himself said he cried when he saw Earth from the moon during an Apollo mission in 1971. The Star Trek actor William Shatner also cried when he returned from a suborbital Blue Origin flight in 2021, saying: "It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death."

Sánchez said she was proud of her fellow crew members' bravery while venturing into the unknown.

"Gayle — you know we were just talking in the capsule — doesn't even have ear piercings, she's so afraid to do anything. And she got in that capsule, and I think it profoundly changed her," Sánchez said.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and has been launching tourists to space since the billionaire himself flew on New Shepard's maiden passenger flight in 2021.

Bezos founded Blue Origin with the idea to help move heavy, polluting industries off our planet and into space, and has said the company could lay the groundwork for one trillion people to live and work in space someday.

This goal is still a long way off but Blue Origin is making progress.

Although New Shepard can only skim the edge of space, in January the company flew its orbital mega-rocket New Glenn for the first time. New Glenn is designed to lift heavy payloads to space and the moon.

• Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and has been competing with SpaceX.
• Blue Origin has two rockets and is developing a moon lander and multifunctional spacecraft.
• Here's the rocket company's history, mission, customers, and biggest rocket launches.

Blue Origin's rockets are making a name for themselves in the private space race.

Jeff Bezos founded the aerospace company in 2000 with the idea of moving heavy, polluting industries off our planet and into space, where millions of people would live and work. The company's name, Blue Origin, refers to Earth.

Bezos called Blue Origin his "most important work," in a 2018 interview with Axel Springer.

Blue Origin's mission is to "build a road to space" by developing reliable, cost-effective rockets.

Blue Origin is vying for space industry dominance as spaceflight companies aim for the moon and Mars. The company's New Shepard rockets regularly fly tourists on short flights to the edge of space. Its New Glenn rocket is designed to carry heavy missions into orbit or to the moon. Blue Origin engineers are also developing a moon lander, called Blue Moon, for future NASA use.

Blue Origin's ambitions have been a source of rivalry between Bezos and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX remains the world's leading rocket-launch provider.

History and founding

Bezos has said he founded Blue Origin with the vision of giant space stations hosting entire mega-cities of people, based on concepts proposed by the physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.

Bezos told Lex Fridman in 2023 that he wants to support one trillion humans living throughout the solar system. He added that would result in 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins at any given time.

"We could easily support a civilization that large with all the resources in the solar system," he added.

Still, Bezos says in a video on Blue Origin's website that "Earth is the best planet."

Blue Origin did not initially seem to improve Jeff Bezos' net worth, though. Bezos later revealed, in 2017, that he was selling Amazon stock to finance the rocket company.

The company kept a very low profile for its first two decades. Blue Origin's first rocket launch was in 2015. That was an uncrewed test flight of the suborbital New Shepard rocket.

Bezos himself flew on New Shepard's first passenger flight in July 2021, making history as the first billionaire to reach the Kármán line, which is a somewhat arbitrary but internationally recognized boundary at 100 kilometers (62 miles) altitude. It's sometimes referred to as the beginning of outer space.

Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO that same year, saying he wanted to focus on Blue Origin.

In May 2023, Blue Origin won a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, after suing the agency for awarding its first moon-landing contract to only SpaceX. The company lost the lawsuit.

Blue Origin's super-sized orbital rocket, New Glenn, launched for the first time in January 2025.

In April 2025, the company clinched its first Pentagon launch contracts.

Blue Origin's CEO is Dave Limp. The company is headquartered in Kent, Washington, and has rocket launch facilities in West Texas. It has also used a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Blue Origin rockets

Blue Origin has one suborbital rocket and one orbital rocket. It's also developing a moon lander and a moon-orbiting spacecraft.

New Glenn

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is designed to launch missions into Earth's orbit and to the moon, with a reusable booster to reduce launch costs.

New Glenn is named after the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn. Seven BE-4 engines on the booster give it enough power to carry up to 45 metric tons into space.

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

Blue Origin had begun developing an orbital launch system by 2013, and New Glenn finally made its inaugural flight in January 2025.

New Glenn's first launch was a major leap forward for Blue Origin. It was the first time a rocket company successfully reached orbit on its first-ever attempt.

Here's how the rocket's launch works: As New Glenn screams through the skies, the booster does most of the heavy lifting. Once its fuel is spent and the rocket is on a strong trajectory toward space, the booster separates from the rocket's second stage, which continues onward using BE-3U engines.

Blue Origin aims to land the booster on a platform in the ocean, but on New Glenn's first flight, the booster was lost as it fell back to Earth. Eventually, the company wants to reuse boosters up to 25 times.

According to Blue Origin, the company is already working with customers for New Glenn missions, including AST SpaceMobile, telecommunications companies, and the US Space Force.

New Shepard

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is designed for suborbital flights which skim the edge of space. It has been flying tourist crews of up to six passengers since 2021.

Bezos himself flew on New Shepard's first flight, then took the Star Trek actor William Shatner on the rocket's second flight later that year.

Upon landing, Shatner said seeing the blackness of space was like looking at death, and added, "I hope I never recover from this."

Blue Origin plans to fly its first all-female passenger crew aboard New Shepard on April 14, including Gayle King, Katy Perry, and Bezos's fiancée, Lauren Sánchez.

Flights on New Shepard last about 11 minutes. Passengers get about three minutes of microgravity, where they can unbuckle from their seats, drift around the spaceship's cabin, and peer out the windows at Earth, before strapping back in for the plummet home.

Because it doesn't need to push itself all the way into orbit, New Shepard is a tiny rocket at just 61 feet tall. BE-3PM engines launch the rocket, then re-fire to softly land it back on the ground. New Shepard is completely reusable.

New Shepard's development involved nine years of testing, which included 16 test flights and three tests of the capsule's emergency escape system.

The vehicle is named after astronaut Alan Shepard, who was the first American to travel to space. Unlike Glenn's orbital flight, Shepard's flight was suborbital.

Blue Moon

Blue Origin is developing the Blue Moon vehicle to land missions on the surface of the moon, launched by the New Glenn rocket.

The company is developing variations of the spacecraft for cargo — up to three metric tons of it — and human crews.

Blue Origin is building BE-7 engines for the lander. The engines are designed to operate in the vacuum of space with enough power to land heavy missions on the moon.

Blue Origin is developing the lander under a $3.4 billion NASA contract.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to conduct an uncrewed test mission to the lunar surface before carrying two astronauts there in 2029.

For NASA astronaut missions, Blue Moon must be able to dock to the Lunar Gateway space station the agency is planning to build in lunar orbit.

Blue Ring

In 2023 Blue Origin announced it was working on a highly maneuverable spacecraft called Blue Ring.

The company plans to sell Blue Ring missions to other companies, which can put more than 3,000 kilograms (about 6,600 pounds) of hardware on board.

Blue Origin says the vehicle can enter a variety of orbits between Earth and the moon.

"Blue Ring addresses two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today: growing space infrastructure and increasing mobility on-orbit," Paul Ebertz, the senior vice president of Blue Origin's in-space systems, said in a statement.

The first New Glenn launch carried a prototype of Blue Ring.

Blue Origin vs. SpaceX

Blue Origin and SpaceX have competed for NASA contracts and clout. SpaceX frequently wins the competition.

SpaceX was founded two years later than Blue Origin, but it was launching rockets to orbit by 2008. Its highly influential orbital Falcon 9 rocket first began flying in 2010. Blue Origin didn't launch its first orbital rocket until 2025.

Some of Bezos' space projects mirror Musk's.

For example, like SpaceX's Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn is designed to be a reusable super-heavy-lift mega-rocket.

While SpaceX launches thousands of Starlink internet satellites into orbit, Bezos's counterpart — Amazon's Kuiper satellites — have been building to their first launch.

At the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024, Bezos said that Blue Origin "is not a very good business, yet."

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

• SpaceX's Starship exploded after spinning out of control during its eighth launch to space.
• An amateur astronomer took a stunning video of Starship spiraling and falling from space in flames.
• The footage shows how Starship created a space-debris hazard over southern Florida.

SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket spiraled out, fell from space, and exploded spectacularly after its eighth launch on Thursday.

SpaceX lost the video feed from Starship and cut off its livestream after the vehicle started tumbling, but Scott Ferguson in Sarasota, Florida was recording the whole thing with a telescope.

His unique video footage shows Starship's demise in detail. It also shows what a space-debris hazard the incident created, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to activate its space-debris protocol and briefly ground flights at airports in Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach. If chunks of Starship came raining down, the FAA said, it didn't want planes in the way.

In Ferguson's video, below, Starship creates a bright, ghostly spiral in the sky with wisps of flame.

After about 45 seconds, the spiral becomes a fiery streak as the Starship plummets.

Ferguson, who has a neuroscience PhD and records space footage for his YouTube channel Astronomy Live, told Business Insider he had a camera and a telescope trained on Starship throughout its launch.

Suddenly, SpaceX's webcast showed Starship tumbling and beginning to fall from space. It was likely to explode any minute.

Ferguson told BI he realized in that moment that the software he used to guide his telescope was lagging behind Starship's actual position. He scanned the horizon and saw a bright flare in the southwestern sky. It looked like Starship was blowing up, bright enough for him to see with the naked eye.

He grabbed the joystick controlling his telescope and pointed it at the dying spaceship. By the time he had Starship in his telescope's sights, mere seconds later, he said, it was already almost exactly due south.

"It goes very quickly," Ferguson said.

He kept following it as it arced across the sky, traversing from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean as it fell from space.

By the end of his footage, just a few minutes later, the blaze of Starship had disappeared below the southeastern horizon.

Ferguson was disappointed to see Starship explode, but pleased with his footage.

"I'm a fan of any big rocket," Ferguson said, adding that he watched most of the Space Shuttle launches growing up.

NASA is counting on this vehicle to land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era, a mission which it aims to fly in 2027.

However, this was Starship's second flight in a row to explode before it finished reaching space.

"It gives me a lot of concern for what that timeline's going to look like," Ferguson said.

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, said on X that the incident was "a minor setback" and another ship would be ready to fly in four to six weeks.

A SpaceX Starship lost control and exploded after launch on Friday. A witness recounted what he saw.

• SpaceX's Starship spun out of control and fell out of contact just as it reached space on Thursday.
• Starship was supposed to deploy mock Starlink satellites and test its structural limits during reentry.
• The FAA grounded flights in southern Florida because of the risk of debris raining down from space.

SpaceX's Starship lost control and started spinning wildly just as it reached space on Thursday, causing major flight disruptions in Florida over the possibility of falling debris.

SpaceX lost contact with Starship and confirmed in a post on X that the spaceship exploded, using its classic euphemism: "a rapid unscheduled disassembly."

That means the ship will most likely rain debris down on Earth along its predesignated flight path. The Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace over southern Florida and issued a ground stop to airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach.

According to the FAA website, the incident led to delays at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and even Philadelphia and Newark airports.

Starship was flying well until about 20 seconds before it was supposed to cut off its engines, which is a major milestone it has passed on multiple flights and is basically the last step of getting itself into space.

That's when some of the ship's engines suddenly went out early, and then it began to spin, said Dan Huot, a SpaceX webcast host.

"We have some more to learn about this vehicle," Huot said on the company's livestream of the flight.

This is the second Starship flight in a row to explode as it climbed to space, taking Elon Musk's biggest ambitions another step back.

Eric Berger, a journalist who has written two books about the rocket company, called the incident "a serious setback for SpaceX."

Starship's second space debris incident

SpaceX said it "immediately began coordination with safety officials" after the ship lost contact.

The incident came just a month after a Starship exploded and rained down huge chunks of debris in the Caribbean, causing the FAA to divert aircraft in the area and triggering an investigation.

"We've got some practice at this now," Huot said. "We've got a lot of measures in place like debris response areas where we coordinate very closely with air traffic control. We have a lot of measures put before we ever launch a rocket to make sure that we're keeping the public safe. Those worked last time and they're actively in work right now."

After the January flight, SpaceX made upgrades to avoid the fuel leaks and fire in the ship's "attic area," which it pinpointed as the cause of the explosion. The company got reapproval from the FAA and flew again Thursday, only to lose Starship again.

"We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand root cause," SpaceX said in its X post.

The future of SpaceX and the space industry at large is on the line.

Starship's many successes

The Starship-Super Heavy launch system — consisting of the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Starship rocket — promises to be the largest, most powerful, and first-ever fully reusable orbital rocket on Earth.

Its prowess could help cut the cost of spaceflight by an order of magnitude, but not anytime soon if SpaceX can't keep Starship in one piece.

Starship has previously flown to space successfully, landed in the ocean with its engines firing, and seen its Super Heavy booster return to Earth and lower itself into a pair of chopstick-like arms on a landing tower.

On Thursday's flight, just a few minutes before Starship's demise, the booster landed flawlessly again.

As the booster slowed itself from supersonic speed, a thunder-like sonic boom sounded across the Texas coastal plain.

On the livestream shortly before launch, the SpaceX communications manager Chris Gebhardt said those booms were like "a spaceship telling everybody it wants to be reused."

Starship, it seems, isn't making the same declaration.

SpaceX was going to test Starship's limits on the way back

The rocket's successes so far have been promising for SpaceX's plans to recover and reuse both Starship and the Super Heavy booster. SpaceX had hoped Thursday's flight would take things a step further.

The flight had two primary goals: to deploy its first payload of mock Starlink satellites in space and to run experiments in Starship's reentry and descent to Earth. It never got the chance.

The flight was intended to test the limits of Starship's structure on its return to Earth, with some of its protective tiles removed from vulnerable areas for stress testing. By contrast, for the ascent to space, SpaceX had made upgrades to fortify Starship.

Musk founded the company in 2002 with the goal of bringing humans to Mars. Starship is the vehicle that's supposed to make that happen.

Musk has said that in addition to hauling astronauts and materials to the moon and conducting rapid point-to-point transport on Earth, Starship could carry 1 million people to Mars, along with all the necessary cargo for them to build a city there.

• SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket for the seventh time on Thursday.
• It performed an epic booster catch for the second time, but the Starship exploded shortly after.
• The launch marked the first flight of a new-generation Starship.

SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket has stumbled on the road to commercial use. On Thursday, it unexpectedly dropped out of communications and exploded as it screamed toward space for its seventh flight.

Shortly after Starship's explosion, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, wrote on X, "Improved versions of the ship & booster already waiting for launch."

The mishap happened on the same day the SpaceX rival Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, successfully launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit. Blue Origin lost New Glenn's booster during Thursday morning's test flight.

What happened to the Starship

After liftoff, the rocket's Super Heavy booster heaved the Starship spaceship toward space, separated itself, and fell back toward Earth. As the falling booster approached SpaceX's Texas facilities, it nailed a complex maneuver that had happened only once before.

The booster fired its engines to lower itself to a catch tower, where a pair of giant "chopstick" arms closed around its trunk and caught it.

This technological feat is key to reaching SpaceX's goal of building a fleet of rapidly, fully reusable rockets to help slash spaceflight costs, advance the company's business model, and ultimately build a city of people on Mars.

"Kudos to you and the whole SpaceX team on the flawless booster catch! Very impressive," Bezos wrote to Musk on X about the achievement.

Shortly after the booster catch, SpaceX said the upper stage of the system, Starship itself, was lost. The company later confirmed on X that it had suffered a rapid unscheduled disassembly, which is another way of saying it exploded.

"We were just coming up to the end of that ascent burn for the ship when we started to lose a couple of the engines," Dan Huot, one of the hosts of SpaceX's livestream of the launch, said in the broadcast.

Then the ship dropped out of communications, meaning there was some kind of anomaly, and Starship was lost, Huot said.

"This was a brand-new vehicle essentially," he added. "With that, there's a lot of things you're upgrading, but there's a lot of things you're going to learn as all those systems are now interacting with each other for the first time."

In an X post on Thursday night, Musk wrote that preliminary indicators suggested Starship "had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity."

"Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month," Musk added.

Dean Olson, who captured footage of the Starship debris while he was in Turks and Caicos, told Business Insider he heard the sound of constant "thunder" for about a minute after witnessing the explosion.

"I'm just walking out of the restaurant holding a cocktail, and I just looked up," Olson said. "Everyone's breath is kind of just taken away."

"Nobody knew what was going on," he added. "There was a lot of people panicking, to be honest with you."

SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX's 7th Starship flight didn't achieve all it set out to

For the first time, SpaceX flew Starship with a reused Raptor rocket engine.

The Super Heavy booster runs on 33 Raptor engines. For the entire rocket to be reusable, as Musk has said he intends it to be, those engines must be recycled and reused, too.

Aboard Thursday's flight, one of those engines was the same one that SpaceX flew on its October flight.

Also flying for the first time was SpaceX's new-generation second-stage Starship. This new generation comes with significant upgrades designed for "bringing major improvements to reliability and performance," the company wrote on its website.

For example, the flaps on this upgraded Starship are smaller and reoriented, so they're not exposed to as much heat upon reentry. These flaps are designed to eventually help Starship fly back and touch down on land, making it reusable.

But SpaceX has not yet recovered a Starship from spaceflight. So far, every Starship that has flown to space has sunk into the Indian Ocean. The ship on Thursday's flight was expected to have the same fate before it was lost shortly after launch.

Starship was scheduled to deploy a set of 10 Starlink simulators, or dummies. They were about the same size and weight as SpaceX's next-generation V3 Starlink satellites. Deploying them was practice for eventually the real thing, which is a key part of SpaceX's business plan.

Starship is set to make other SpaceX rockets obsolete

In its final form, Starship should be able to release up to 100 second-generation Starlink satellites at a time, increasing SpaceX's internet coverage and a core pillar of its income.

Once Starship is operational, its sheer power will probably make it the cornerstone of SpaceX's business, which has long hinged on the comparatively wimpy Falcon 9 and its hefty counterpart, Falcon Heavy.

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," SpaceX's chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, said at the Baron Investment Conference in November, according to Ars Technica.

"We'll be flying that for six to eight more years," she added, "but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times."

• 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.

Bezos, who was present at New Glenn's launch, uploaded a minute-long clip of the launch on X shortly after liftoff.

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."

"I'm incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp on Thursday. "We knew landing our booster, So You're Telling Me There's a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We'll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone."

Blue Origin loses booster in an otherwise successful launch

In a statement two hours after the launch, Blue Origin confirmed that it had lost its booster after it separated from the rocket

The booster was meant to return to Earth and land on a platform in the ocean, which would have been the company's first step to proving the reusability of its booster.

This makes SpaceX the only company to have recovered and reused a rocket's booster. The 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.

Musk congratulated Bezos shortly after New Glenn's successful liftoff.

"Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt! @JeffBezos," Musk wrote on X.

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," Limp wrote on X in December. Blue Ring is designed to fulfill that need for both government and commercial customers, the Blue Origin CEO 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.

• 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.

• SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket system on Tuesday for the sixth time.
• SpaceX didn't attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster by a pair of "chopsticks" mid-air as planned.
• Starship moving towards full, rapid reusability is key to Elon Musk's plans for Mars.

SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket for the sixth time on Tuesday, but the main event was canceled.

The space company successfully launched the 36-story-tall rocket system but ended up abandoning its plan to catch the Super Heavy booster upon its return to Earth with a giant pair of metal arms, nicknamed "chopsticks."

SpaceX achieved the major feat for the first time in October, during Starship's fifth test launch.

Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO, has said his plans of building a Mars city rests on Starship.

The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built, consisting of two stages: a Super Heavy booster at the bottom and a Starship on top.

On Tuesday, Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines roared to life, heaving Starship through the skies.

After about three minutes, Super Heavy released itself and fell back to Earth.

When the catch attempt was called off, the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico nearly seven minutes after launch while Starship continued on toward space.

SpaceX officials said on the company's livestream that the catch wasn't attempted this time because "strict criteria were not met" and this was a known possibility before launch.

During Starship's fifth test flight in October, SpaceX successfully caught the Super Heavy booster with a giant pair of metal arms, nicknamed "chopsticks," that caught it before it reached the ground.

SpaceX's next major milestone for Starship

Ultimately, Starship is designed to be the first ever fully, rapidly reusable rocket.

SpaceX has been reusing its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets for years, but only the first stage returns for reuse, the second stage is discarded after each launch.

Moreover, the Falcon 9 first stage lands on a barge in the ocean and must be retrieved for reuse, which takes extra time.

Starship is different. Both its first-stage Super Heavy booster and second-stage Starship are designed to be rapidly reusable by returning to the launch site after lift-off.

This is SpaceX's North Star. If the company succeeds, it could make spaceflight 10 times cheaper, and, ultimately, help humanity achieve multi-planetary status.

SpaceX's next major goal is to prove it can consistently retrieve Super Heavy and also retrieve Starship — but that milestone remains for another day.

For this test launch, Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean as expected about an hour and five minutes after launch.

During its flight in space, Starship fired one of its Raptor engines for the first time, proving a capability it will need during future launches to return and touch down on land.

SpaceX also chose to launch Starship in the afternoon this time instead of the early morning, so that it can better observe Starship's landing, The New York Times reported.

SpaceX and Musk are racking up wins

Despite SpaceX not catching Super Heavy on its return to Earth, the test launch is still another successful step toward making Starship viable for orbital flights, moon landings, and eventually long journeys to and from Mars.

Tuesday's flight came just one month after the Starship's fifth test flight. That's a rapid turnaround for such a major test.

Maintaining this fast pace will be critical to achieving Musk's latest goal of sending the first Starships to Mars in just two years.

Another notable development was that President-elect Donald Trump attended the Starship launch.

Ahead of the event, Trump announced on Truth Social that he'd be in attendance, writing, "Good luck to Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!"

Trump's presence indicates just how influential Musk may become in the next administration, which could be a boon for space exploration.