عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Bezos' Blue Origin calls off New Glenn Launch Again, Eyes Thursday

A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket stands ready for its inaugural launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., January 11, 2025. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo
A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket stands ready for its inaugural launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., January 11, 2025. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo
TT
TT

Bezos' Blue Origin calls off New Glenn Launch Again, Eyes Thursday

A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket stands ready for its inaugural launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., January 11, 2025. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo
A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket stands ready for its inaugural launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., January 11, 2025. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin moved the launch of its New Glenn rocket from Tuesday to Thursday, Jan. 16, further pushing back its inaugural attempt to reach orbit and compete with SpaceX in the satellite launch market.

The company called off its first scheduled launch on Monday after a technical issue was encountered in the lead-up to its takeoff.

The three-hour launch window opens at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) on Thursday, Blue Origin said in a post on X, according to Reuters.

The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as Elon Musk's SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut with its reusable Falcon 9, the world's most active rocket.

New Glenn is more than twice as powerful as a Falcon 9 rocket and has dozens of customer launch contracts collectively worth billions of dollars lined up.

The rocket would seek to land New Glenn's first stage booster on a sea-fairing barge in the Atlantic Ocean 10 minutes after liftoff, while the rocket's second stage continues toward orbit.

"The thing we're most nervous about is the booster landing," Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, told Reuters in a pre-launch interview on Sunday. "Clearly on a first flight you could have an anomaly at any mission phase, so anything could happen.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

Chili Paste Heats Up Dishes at Northeastern Tunisia’s Harissa Festival

Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)
Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)
TT
TT

Chili Paste Heats Up Dishes at Northeastern Tunisia’s Harissa Festival

Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)
Chahida Boufaied, owner of Dar Chahida Lel Oula, prepares the Harissa in her house in Nabeul, Tunisia, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ons Abid)

For years, Tunisians have been picking bright red peppers, combining them with garlic, vinegar and spices and turning them into a saucy spread called harissa. The condiment is a national staple and pastime, found in homes, restaurants and food stalls throughout the coastal North African nation.

Brick-red, spicy and tangy, it can be scooped up on bread drizzled with olive oil or dabbed onto plates of eggs, fish, stews or sandwiches. Harissa can be sprinkled atop merguez sausages, smeared on savory pastries called brik or sandwiches called fricassées, The Associated Press reported.
In Nabeul, the largest city in Tunisia’s harissa-producing Cap Bon region, local chef and harissa specialist Chahida Boufayed called it “essential to Tunisian cuisine.”
“Harissa is a love story,” she said at a festival held in honor of the chili paste sauce in the northeastern Tunisian city of Nabeul earlier this month. “I don’t make it for the money.”
Aficionados from across Tunisia and the world converged on the 43-year-old mother’s stand to try her recipe. Surrounded by strings of drying baklouti red peppers, she described how she grows her vegetables and blends them with spices to make harissa.
The region’s annual harissa festival has grown in the two-plus years since the United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO, recognized the sauce on a list of items of intangible cultural heritage, said Zouheir Belamin, the president of the association behind the event, a Nabeul-based preservation group. He said its growing prominence worldwide was attracting new tourists to Tunisia, specifically to Nabeul.
UNESCO in 2022 called harissa an integral part of domestic provisions and the daily culinary and food traditions of Tunisian society, adding it to a list of traditions and practices that mark intangible cultural heritage.
Already popular across North Africa as well as in France, the condiment is gaining popularity throughout the world from the United States to China.
Seen as sriracha’s North African cousin, harissa is typically prepared by women who sun-dry harvested red peppers and then deseed, wash and ground them. Its name comes from “haras” – the Arabic verb for “to crush” – because of the next stage in the process.
The finished peppers are combined it with a mixture of garlic cloves, vinegar, salt, olive oil and spices in a mortar and pestle to make a fragrant blend. Variants on display at Nabeul’s Jan. 3-5 festival used cumin, coriander and different spice blends or types of peppers, including smoked ones, to create pastes ranging in color from burgundy to crimson.
“Making harissa is an art. If you master it, you can create wonders,” Boufayed said.