After abruptly calling off its first launch attempt in the early hours of Monday morning, Blue Origin notched a historic success with its first orbital rocket.

Shrugging off bad weather, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched its powerful New Glenn rocket on its maiden flight early Thursday, lighting up a cloudy overnight sky as it climbed away from Cape Canaveral in a high-stakes bid to compete with Elon Musk's industry-leading SpaceX.

KEY TAKEAWAYS Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company, launched its large rocket for the first time early Thursday.After several postponed launches, the 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:03 a.

Blue Origin launched its New Glenn rocket into orbit on Thursday at 1:03 a.m. CST from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The billionaire’s rocket is ready for its first launch. It could give satellite operators and the DoD a long-desired option to SpaceX—at a cheaper price, Forbes reveals.

The 320-foot New Glenn rocket was initially scheduled to launch early Monday with a prototype satellite aboard.

After years of development, Blue Origin is finally ready to conduct the maiden test flight of the company’s New Glenn rocket. The flight is currently scheduled for a three-hour launch window on Friday, Jan. 10, starting at 1 am EST. The company plans to begin live streaming the event on BlueOrigin.com about an hour before the launch.

Blue Origin officials hope to send their heavy-lift New Glenn rocket on its unmanned maiden voyage into space after 1 a.m. EST, with the mission's goal being to reach orbit before returning to Earth.

If New Glenn can continue to demonstrate its capabilities and (more crucially) its reliability, it has the potential to take some business that SpaceX would otherwise struggle to accommodate.

Mr. Bezos recently said he expected Blue Origin would eventually make more money than Amazon. Like SpaceX, the company is envisioning New Glenn not as a rocket just to launch satellites for customers.

Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.