Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Launches New Glenn Rocket on 1st Test flight

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
TT

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Launches New Glenn Rocket on 1st Test flight

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.
Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA's Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago, The Associated Press reported.
Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits. Company employees erupted in cheers and frenzied applause once the craft successfully reached orbit.
For this test, the satellite was expected to remain inside the second stage while circling Earth. The mission was expected to last six hours, with the second stage then placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA's practices for minimizing space junk.
The first-stage booster missed its landing on a barge in the Atlantic minutes after liftoff so it could be recycled, but the company stressed that the No. 1 objective was for the test satellite to reach orbit. “What a fantastic day,” Blue Origin's launch commentator Ariane Cornell, said.
New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.
Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which honors John Glenn, is five times taller.
Blue Origin poured more than $1 billion into New Glenn's launch site, rebuilding historic Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pad is 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the company's control centers and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
Bezos — taking part in the launch from Mission Control — declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he does not see Blue Origin in a competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator.
Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, if everything goes well, with the next one coming up this spring.
“There’s room for lots of winners” Bezos said from the rocket factory over the weekend, adding that this was the “very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry ... to lower the cost of access to space."



Scientists Say Several Thousand Earthquakes Detected Near Greece’s Island of Santorini

 Members of Greece’s military geographical team proceed to conduct measurements to evaluate potential structural changes due to the ongoing seismic activity on the volcanic island of Nea Kameni, Greece February 10, 2025. (Reuters)
Members of Greece’s military geographical team proceed to conduct measurements to evaluate potential structural changes due to the ongoing seismic activity on the volcanic island of Nea Kameni, Greece February 10, 2025. (Reuters)
TT

Scientists Say Several Thousand Earthquakes Detected Near Greece’s Island of Santorini

 Members of Greece’s military geographical team proceed to conduct measurements to evaluate potential structural changes due to the ongoing seismic activity on the volcanic island of Nea Kameni, Greece February 10, 2025. (Reuters)
Members of Greece’s military geographical team proceed to conduct measurements to evaluate potential structural changes due to the ongoing seismic activity on the volcanic island of Nea Kameni, Greece February 10, 2025. (Reuters)

Scientists have detected several thousand earthquakes, the vast majority of them with small magnitudes, in just over two weeks near Greece's volcanic island of Santorini, the University of Athens' crisis management committee said Tuesday, adding that a larger quake cannot be ruled out.

The highly unusual barrage of earthquakes which began in late January has alarmed authorities. They have declared a state of emergency on Santorini, one of Greece’s most popular tourist destinations, deploying rescue crews with drones and a sniffer dog and putting coast guard and navy vessels on standby.

Thousands of residents and visitors have left the island, while schools on Santorini and nearby islands have been ordered to remain closed for the week.

Extra doctors and paramedics have been sent to Santorini's hospital, while six disaster medicine teams are on standby as reinforcements. Medical staff practiced an evacuation drill Tuesday, running out of the building while wheeling stretchers with people posing as patients.

“The preparation of our health facilities for natural disasters such as earthquakes is of vital importance,” Deputy Health Minister Marios Themistokleous said while visiting the hospital.

Scientists have been closely monitoring the earthquake swarm occurring between the islands of Santorini and Amorgos, and the two volcanoes in the area. They say it’s unclear whether the dozens of quakes each day – ranging from magnitude 3 to roughly 5 or just above – are a precursor to a significantly larger, main earthquake or will continue with frequent lower magnitude quakes for several weeks or months.

Overall, about 12,000 earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 1 have been registered since Jan. 26, with 109 occurring on Monday alone, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens' crisis management committee said in a statement Tuesday.

Thirteen of Monday's quakes registered magnitudes greater than 4, while several more with similar magnitudes struck on Tuesday. The largest so far, with a magnitude 5.2, struck on Monday night and was followed about two hours later by another with magnitude 5.

“The possibility of a main earthquake following cannot be ruled out,” the statement said.

Scientists were deploying more surveying equipment in the area Tuesday to monitor the situation, the University of Athens said, while seismologists and volcanologists were to meet with government officials Tuesday evening as part of regular discussions of the situation.

Although Greece lies in a highly seismically active part of the world and earthquakes are frequent, it is very rare for any part of the country to experience such an intense barrage of earthquakes for such an extended period of time.

Santorini took its present crescent shape following a massive volcanic eruption in antiquity — one of the largest known eruptions in human history. Now, millions of visitors each year see its dramatic scenery of whitewashed houses and blue-domed churches clinging to the rim of the caldera, the flooded crater left behind by a volcano that erupted and then collapsed.