Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company has canceled the launch of a new rocket

Blue Origin canceled the first launch of its giant rocket earlier Monday due to technical problems.

The 98-meter New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn with a prototype satellite from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force station. But the launch controllers had to deal with an unspecified rocket problem in the final minutes of the countdown and timed out. When the countdown clock was stopped, they immediately began to drain all the fuel from the rocket.

Blue Origin did not immediately set a new launch date, saying the team needed more time to resolve the issue.

The test flight has already been delayed by rough seas that jeopardized the company's plan to land the first stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. It is five times taller than Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket that carries paying customers to the edge of space from Texas.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos founded the company 25 years ago. He took part in Monday's countdown from Mission Control, a rocket factory just outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center about 80 miles east of Orlando, Fla.

No matter what happens, Bezos said Sunday evening, “we're going to pick ourselves up and move on.”