The very long wait for Jeff Bezos' big rocket is coming to an end

The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos' space dreams is finally ready to launch.

A New Glenn rocket -- built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago -- is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.

In the predawn darkness Monday, it may head to space for the first time.

"This has been very long awaited," said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.

New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company -- Elon Musk's SpaceX -- is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX's innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world's richest person.

"SpaceX is clearly dominating" the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Harrison said. "There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX."

New Glenn is larger than SpaceX's current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing.

Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon and a space tug called Blue Ring -- a vehicle that could move satellites around in Earth orbit.

Bezos' other company -- the behemoth online retailer Amazon -- also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network.

Bezos, the second richest person in the world after Musk, also talks grandiosely about a future where millions of people live and work in space, of immense cylindrical habitats spinning to provide artificial gravity, and of moving polluting industries into space someday to allow Earth to return to a more pristine state.

"I know that sounds fantastical," Bezos said during an interview at The New York Times' DealBook Summit in December, "so I beg the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it's not fantastical."

But those plans and hopes cannot get off the ground without a rocket. "That's what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about," Bezos said.

The 21st-century space age is often depicted as a race of billionaires rather than of nations, but so far it has not been a race at all. SpaceX, which Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put anything in orbit.

"I think a lot of people forget Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX," Harrison said.

Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, which goes up and down. It passes the 62-mile-high altitude regarded as the edge of space but never comes close to reaching the velocity of more than 17,000 mph needed to enter orbit around the planet. The New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Bezos, and for science experiments.

The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses Blue Origin engines for the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.

In 2015, with pomp and publicity, Bezos announced plans for the rocket, which was then unnamed.

Bezos said it would be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin would build in Florida near NASA's Kennedy Space Center. He pledged it would launch by the end of the decade.

The factory appeared -- gargantuan boxy buildings colored with the company's signature bright blue hue -- but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit Earth, did not.

Blue Origin kept pushing back the date of the rocket's debut.

During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president at Blue Origin overseeing the development of New Glenn, said he expected "multiple" launches of New Glenn in 2024. While giving a tour of the Blue Origin factory in February 2024, he said he expected two launches by the end of the year.

The delays continued. The debut flight of New Glenn, which was to carry two identical spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission to make measurements of the atmosphere of Mars, was to launch in October.

But in September, NASA, doubtful that New Glenn would be ready in time, announced it had pulled ESCAPADE off that inaugural launch.

Blue Origin said that a prototype of Blue Ring, the space tug, would fly instead. In early December, the full rocket rolled out to the launchpad.

Blue Origin had been waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to award a license for launch. That finally came on Dec. 27.

Later that day, Blue Origin conducted a launch rehearsal, with the countdown clock ticking down to zero and the rocket's engines lighting up and unleashing torrents of flames and smoke. But, as intended, the rocket remained firmly clamped down, and after 24 seconds, the engines were turned off -- a final test to sift out and fix glitches.

As soon as 1 a.m. Eastern time Monday, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of a shutdown of the engines, New Glenn will soar toward space. The middle-of-the-night launch window, which extends until 4 a.m., results from air restrictions imposed by the FAA for a large, untested rocket. Scheduled launch attempts Friday and Sunday were postponed because of choppy seas in the Atlantic Ocean where the booster is intended to land.

The hope is that the debut of New Glenn is better late than never.

Last year, Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could speed up its pace to as many as one launch a month in 2025 and eventually double that or more.

No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launching of a new vehicle that quickly.

"That's pretty substantial," said Carissa Christensen, CEO of BryceTech, a space consulting company in Alexandria, Virginia. But if Blue Origin cannot keep up with its promised pace, its customers could also fall behind schedule.

Like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, New Glenn aims to be partially reusable, with the booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform named Jacklyn, after Bezos' mother.

For the first flight, the booster has been given the nickname So You're Telling Me There's a Chance.

On the social media site X, Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, explained: "Why? No one has landed a reusable booster on the first try. Yet, we're going for it, and humbly submit having good confidence in landing it. But like I said a couple of weeks ago, if we don't, we'll learn and keep trying until we do."

Harrison said the reusable boosters, designed to launch at least 25 times, would help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. The Vulcan from United Launch Alliance and the Ariane 6 rocket from Arianespace both currently fly just once and drop into the ocean.

The second stage, which heads to orbit with the payload, will burn up when it reenters the atmosphere.

With several companies planning to fill the sky with multitudes of communications satellites, there appears to be more than enough business for all of the rocket companies, at least for a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches from three companies -- Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace -- to loft more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.

Amazon later announced it was also buying three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.

Blue Origin is not relying solely on business from Amazon. In November, it won an agreement from AST SpaceMobile for several New Glenn launches. AST is building a cellular broadband network that is to work directly with smartphones.

The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another target for Blue Origin. If successful, this flight would count as the first of two flights needed for the U.S. Space Force to certify the rocket as ready for national security satellites.

The ESCAPADE mission, bumped off the first New Glenn launch, could head to space on a later New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.

Blue Origin is also aiming for business beyond rockets.

The concept of space tugs like Blue Ring is not new, and there could be several uses for a spacecraft that could nestle up to another one. A rocket launch could drop off several satellites to one particular orbit, and a space tug could then move them to different destinations. Space tugs could also repair or refuel older satellites or dispose of dead pieces of space junk by pushing them back into the atmosphere to burn up.

The Defense Innovation Unit, part of the Department of Defense, is sponsoring the flight of what Blue Origin calls the "pathfinder" for future Blue Ring spacecraft. The prototype will remain attached to the second stage of New Glenn during the six-hour mission.

Several New Glenn launches will be used to get the Blue Moon lander in position to take astronauts to the lunar surface during the NASA's Artemis V mission, currently scheduled for 2030. If the incoming Trump administration revamps the Artemis program, Blue Origin's role in it could grow, or diminish.

Bezos' Amazon wealth means Blue Origin does not need to be an immediate success, and he is investing for the long term.

"I think it's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while," Bezos said during the DealBook Summit. "Blue Origin is going do some very amazing things."