Thirty stories tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2am local time from Blue Origin’s launchpad at Cape Canaveral space force station, its seven engines thundering for miles under cloudy skies on its second liftoff attempt this week.

Hundreds of employees at the company’s Kent, Washington, headquarters and its Cape Canaveral, Florida rocket factory roared in applause as Blue Origin vice president Ariane Cornell announced the rocket’s second stage made it to orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.

“We hit our key, critical, number-one objective, we got to orbit safely. And y’all we did it on our first go,” Cornell said on a company live stream.

The rocket’s reusable first stage booster was due for a landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage, but failed to make that landing, Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster blacked minutes after its lift-off.

“We did in fact lose the booster,” Cornell said.

The culmination of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first trek to Earth’s orbit, where it plans to send dozens of customer satellites lined up on New Glenn’s mission backlog.

Secured inside New Glenn’s payload bay for the mission is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a manoeuvrable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.

The rocket’s first attempt to launch on Monday was scrubbed at around 3am because ice had accumulated on a propellant line. On Thursday, the company cited no issues ahead of launch.