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Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was forced to delay the eagerly awaited liftoff of its powerful launch vehicle on Sunday due to adverse meteorological conditions at Cape Canaveral.

Mission Postponement Causes

Precipitation and a ground system issue caused early setbacks, then came cumulus cloud cover as the narrow time frame for launch ended, leaving mission controllers to reschedule the vehicle's upcoming flight.

Competition between Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been heating up in recent months.

New Launch Window

To ease airspace congestion during the government funding gap, the Federal Aviation Administration is limiting private space launches from the beginning of the week.

After scrubbing the mission, Blue Origin said late Sunday that, in coordination with the FAA, it was targeting a new try as soon as Wednesday within a window of afternoon hours Eastern Standard time.

Launch Goals

Upon successful liftoff, the 98-meter tall launch vehicle will carry NASA’s Escapade twin spacecraft to Mars, to study the planet’s climate history with the eventual hope of sending people there.

The mission will also act as a crucial trial of its ability to perform reusable rocket landing, which would represent a major advancement for the company if accomplished.

Earlier Mission

New Glenn’s inaugural flight in the start of the year was marked as a success, as its payload reached space and successfully performed experiments.

But its first-stage booster, which was designed as recoverable, failed to make its landing on a platform in the Atlantic, and ended up destroyed during descent.

Landing Attempts

For this new mission Blue Origin will try once more to land the first stage.

Thus far, only SpaceX has achieved that accomplishment.

Space Race

The competing companies of billionaires Bezos and Musk are engaged in a private sector space competition that has grown more intense lately, as the space agency opened up proposals for its lunar exploration program, complaining that one company was falling behind schedule.

The current administration has seen the government push NASA to accelerate its timeline to send a crewed mission to the lunar surface amid a race with the Asian nation.

More rivalry between SpaceX and Blue Origin could “give us more choices with regard to liftoff.”

“Additional missions means greater innovation in space,” a former NASA chief technologist stated. “It can’t be a bad thing to have Blue Origin, even trailing behind.”