Blue Origin got its license, the payload is secure and now it has a target launch window to try and send up its New Glenn rocket for the first time.

The company announced late Monday that it was aiming for an early Friday liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 36 during a three-hour window that opens at 1 a.m.

Similar to how SpaceX recovers first-stage boosters on droneships in the Atlantic, Blue Origin has already sent out its ship Jacklyn, named after company founder Jeff Bezos’ mother, to attempt a recovery, as well.

“This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for New Glenn, said in a press release. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”

Bezos’ company received a five-year launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration on Dec. 27, the same day Blue Origin performed a hot fire test of the rocket on the pad, marking the final steps needed before preparing for launch.

The rocket was then rolled back to the integration facility at SLC-36 to load up the payload for launch. The rocket is sending up the company’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, which is designed to prove capabilities for future deployment of fully operational Blue Ring hardware, the company’s miniature spacecraft system designed to transport customer satellites to their final orbital destinations.

“Blue Ring Pathfinder integrated. Jacklyn well underway. Launch license received. Here we go!” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp posted on X late Monday.

The flight plan calls for the Blue Ring Pathfinder to remain affixed within Blue Origin’s second stage during the entire flight, but it will let the company validate communications from orbit to ground, in-space telemetry, tracking and command hardware, and ground-based radiometric tracking.

The launch also acts as the first of two required certification flights needed by the company to get approved to fly national security missions.

The rocket’s debut had faced delays, and was originally targeting an October liftoff with a pair of Mars-bound satellites for NASA. NASA opted to hold off to a future New Glenn launch, though, so the company opted to fly its own hardware to start.

It has several other customers including Bezos’ old company, Amazon, which contracted New Glenn to fly a big chunk of its Project Kuiper internet satellite constellation.

The rocket stages are manufactured at the company’s facilities on Merritt Island adjacent the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

New Glenn is designed for reusability with its boosters — with the company aiming to get up to 25 reflights out of them.

Blue Origin already has practice in booster recovery with its smaller suborbital rocket New Shepard, that fly out of Texas, but the 322-foot-tall New Glenn is a much bigger brother powered by seven of the company’s BE-4 engines, able to produce up to 3.9 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

It would be the first new company to launch from the Space Coast since Relativity Space’s Terran-1 launch in March 2023 and the first new rocket since the debut of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan in January 2024.