The successful flight to orbit of the Amazon founder’s powerful rocket suggests it could grow into a credible competitor with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Blue Origin is key to Amazon's ability to compete with SpaceX Starlink. Jeff Bezos has finally done it. He's finally reached space with an honest-to-goodness orbital-class rocket. Ten years ago, Bezos ignited a feud with SpaceX founder Elon Musk when his Blue Origin rocket company launched a suborbital New Shepard rocket to the edge of space and then landed it back on Earth.

Bezos’ space company Blue Origin started at about the same time as Musk’s SpaceX but since then Musk’s firm has launched more than 400 of its Falcon 9 rockets into orbit and is testing out its giant Starship rocket which it hopes will send astronauts to the Moon and one day possibly on to Mars.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos founded the company 25 years ago. He took part in Monday’s countdown from Mission Control, located at the rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Orlando, Florida.

If New Glenn can continue to demonstrate its capabilities and (more crucially) its reliability, it has the potential to take some business that SpaceX would otherwise struggle to accommodate.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space dreams are taking flight on a new level. On Thursday, Bezos' Blue Origin company launched its big rocket, called New Glenn. It lifted off at 2:30 a.m. ET from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,

message posted on X. New Glenn is named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. According to Blue Origin, the rocket is “engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly ...

The 320-foot New Glenn rocket was initially scheduled to launch early Monday with a prototype satellite aboard.

The reusable spacecraft had been due to take off from Florida but the launch was halted as anomalies were detected after the countdown began

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 lift-off, while the rocket’s second stage continues toward orbit.

John Glenn. It is five times taller than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket that carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos founded the company 25 years ago.

Watch live as Amazon boss Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin attempts to launch its New Glenn rocket for the first time from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday. It is the long-delayed debut launch of Mr Bezos's challenge to SpaceX's dominance in the satellite launch market.