Happy Monday, friends. It’s your Space Coast correspondent James Sparvero here after a long, disappointing night for anyone who stayed up hoping to watch Blue Origin’s big, new rocket take off for the very first time.
How late were you watching? I’m just waking up after New Glenn’s launch teams decided to stand down after 3 a.m. with less than an hour left in the launch window.
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Blue Origin hasn’t elaborated on whatever technical issues led to the scrub, nor have they announced when the next launch attempt will be.
The excitement could certainly be felt before I watched more and more people leave the beach as hope faded with each new 20- or 30-minute delay.
If I had to pick a favorite moment, which obviously can be tough when you stay up all night for a let down (such is the nature of any launch), it would be listening on the Washington Avenue beach crossover as dozens arriving caught their first glimpse of New Glenn and were audibly blown away from just the sight of a rocket that big, that close.
It was a moment I’ve personally been looking forward to for five years since the pad at Launch Complex 36 started towering over Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach. This pad was even a factor when I bought my house because I wanted to live as close to this assignment as I could!
That little fun fact was great for small talk with Blue Origin employees when I got to go to the rocket factory where New Glenn was made just a few hours before the launch window opened. From a balcony overlooking the factory floor, the man Jeff Bezos picked to get his new rocket off the ground, CEO Dave Limp, talked to me and our CBS space expert Bill Harwood about the inevitable challenges that come with a maiden flight.
“It’s hard,” Limp put it bluntly. “Otherwise, everybody would be doing it, but I do feel like we’ve tested this vehicle. We did our hot fire a couple weeks ago. We’ve run simulations, and the team has been working on this for a long time. So I’m confident in the vehicle. Obviously, there’s lots of things that have to go right to make this happen.”
What he said resonates with me even more after how the night unfolded. As one comment I read concluded, “better scrubs than RUDs.”
📧 Do you have any specific space topics you’d like to discuss? Send me an email here.
👋 Here’s a little bit more about me.
Little did I know when watching Apollo 13 in the third grade that 20 years later, I was destined for a thrilling career as your Space Coast multimedia journalist.
Chemistry and biology weren’t so interesting to me in high school science, but I loved my Earth and Space class (Thanks, Mr. Lang).
Then in 2016, I traded Capitol correspondent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for space correspondent. I’m proud that my first live report at News 6 happened to be the first time SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster on a barge. What seems so routine now was a really big deal that day in our newsroom!
From there, I’ve covered the Commercial Crew program and the return of human spaceflight to Kennedy Space Center (Demo-2 launched on my 33rd birthday!)
Now, as our coverage looks forward to missions to the moon and Mars, I often tell others I have the best job in local news. Because after all I’ve seen so far, I think I would be bored working somewhere else. I even bought a house near the Cape with a great view to the north so I never miss a launch even when I’m not working.
After eight years on the beat, though, I still consider myself a young space reporter and I always look forward to learning something new with every assignment.
Have a great launch into the rest of your week!