THE NEW SPACE RACE: Although it’s “insane” to try to land New Glenn, Bezos says it’s important to try.

I asked what his expectations were for the launch of New Glenn, which has a three-hour window that opens at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Monday, January 13. The launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base lay several miles away from the factory where we conducted the interview.

“We would certainly like to achieve orbit, and get the Blue Ring Pathfinder into orbit,” Bezos said. “Landing the booster would be gravy on top of that. It’s kind of insane to try and land the booster. A more sane approach would probably be to try to land it in the ocean. But we’re gonna go for it.”

Blue Origin has built a considerable amount of infrastructure on a drone ship, Jacklyn, that will be waiting offshore for the rocket to land upon. Was Bezos not concerned about putting that hardware at risk?

“I’m worried about everything,” he admitted. However, the rocket has been programmed to divert from the ship if the avionics on board the vehicle sense that anything is off-nominal.

And there is, of course, a pretty good chance of that happening.

“We’ve done a lot of work, we’ve done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight,” Bezos said. “And you can’t be overconfident in these things. You have to be realistic. The reality is, there are a lot of things that go wrong, and you have to accept that, if something goes wrong, we’ll pick ourselves up and get busy for the second flight.”

You get the feeling that Blue Origin might be a lot further along by now if Bezos had embraced “insane” earlier on. But that’s water under the bridge and here’s to hoping for a successful launch and recovery when New Glenn does fly.