Blue Origin confirms 2026 launch
October 9, 2026

By Chris Forrester



Blue Origin says it will fly a New Glenn rocket before the end of the year, and return to flight following on from the disastrous explosion in May.

The Jeff Bezos-backed rocket company has also officially filed a request with the Federal Aviation Commission (FAA) for permission to ramp up its launch cadence from the current 12 per year to 50. Blue Origin is already investing in new launch pads and is constructing three new pads.


Bezos, in an interview with Fox News, said: “We’re building three more pads. So we’re building, we’ll have a total of four pads that we’re under construction right now. And, you know, our goal is to fly every day. And then once we’re flying every day, we want to fly every hour. And then once we’re flying every hour, we want to fly every minute. And by the way, that’s where I lose the team.”

He explained his thinking behind the aggressive comment, saying: “[The team] think I’m crazy that we’re going to fly every minute. But I’ve seen crazy things before come true. So, at Amazon one time, I told people we’d one day have 100 million Amazon Prime members. And I thought the leadership team at Amazon thought it was nuts. But today we have several hundred Amazon Prime members.”

“So these things can happen. And you’ll see that space travel becomes much more routine than it has been to date,” he added.

Funding this expansion could be costly. In September it emerged that Bezos had personally invested an extra $2 billion in a funding round that reportedly raised a total of $10 billion (and taking Bezos’s commitment to Blue Origin to around $32 billion). The rumour now is that Blue Origin is likely to mount an Initial Public Offering, probably in 2027 once the rocket’s reliability is back on track.