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Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space company's giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida on its paying debut mission Thursday, sending two NASA satellites to Mars and securing the first landing of its reusable launch vehicle.
The powerful two-stage rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, marking the first mission of any kind undertaken by Blue Origin since New Glenn's first launch, NG-1. in January 2025.
With Thursday's launch, Blue Origin delivered its first science payload into space for NASA or any customer, a major milestone for the company in its quest to compete on a more level playing field with Elon Musk's SpaceX, the world's leading rocket launch service.
Blue Origin's live webcast showed the rocket rising from its launch tower across a clear daytime sky in roaring flames and billowing clouds of steam just after its seven BE-4 liquid-propellant engines roared to life. The launch followed several days of delay due to cloudy skies and geomagnetic storm.
About 10 minutes after liftoff, New Glenn's 17-story first-stage booster landed back on the deck of a barge floating in the Atlantic, achieving for Blue Origin a key reusability goal pioneered by Elon Musk's SpaceX. The first attempt at such a landing in January failed.
Cheers erupted at Blue Origin's Rocket Park Mission Control Center in Cape Canaveral as video of the launch vehicle's landing was shown, dubbed “Never Tell Me the Odds” in reference to a line uttered by Star Wars hero Han Solo in the film. The Empire Strikes Back.
About 20 minutes later, mission control confirmed that New Glenn's upper stage had completed its primary task of deployment. NASA's sister spacecraft EscaPADE into outer space for a 22-month journey to Mars.
Arianna Cornell, Blue Origin's vice president, called the launch “the next era of Blue Origin spaceflight.”
Space weather research
Two NASA spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, are scheduled to reach Mars in 2027 and enter synchronized elliptical orbits for an 11-month study of the planet's space weather.
Instruments on board the satellites will analyze how solar winds—the oscillating stream of high-energy charged particles from the Sun—interact with Mars' relatively weak magnetic field, and how that interaction may contribute to the depletion of the thin Martian atmosphere.
EscaPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, was originally scheduled to launch in October 2024 but was delayed due to setbacks in the development of the New Glenn rocket.
The Blue and Gold satellites were built for NASA by California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab using instruments provided by the University of California, Berkeley.
The rocket also carried an additional payload from satellite company Viasat, which remained attached to its upper stage for a technical demonstration of space communications relay over Earth.
When the rocket made its debut flight in January, it carried Blue Origin's own payload into space – a prototype of the maneuverable Blue Ring spacecraft that the company is developing for the Pentagon and commercial customers.
Competition with SpaceX Musk
Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, was until recently known primarily for its space tourism business, which takes wealthy passengers to the edge of space on its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship. The single-stage, reusable device also conducted more than 200 research experiments in its capsule.
Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars developing New Glenn, a heavy-duty rocket designed to be the company's workhorse for carrying people and cargo into orbit.
Named after John Glenn, first American to orbit the EarthThe spacecraft produces twice the liftoff thrust of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and about the same as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, while offering more cargo space than its competitors.
NASA spent about $55 million on the EscaPADE mission — a modest price compared to the agency's multibillion-dollar space programs — and paid Blue Origin $18 million for the flight to New Glenn, federal procurement data showed.
Blue Origin also supplies rocket engines for other companies, including United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur, and is working on a crewed lunar lander for NASA's Artemis lunar exploration program, as well as a space station in collaboration with other organizations.
Blue Origin has a long way to go to catch up with SpaceX, which has launched its Falcon rockets on nearly 280 missions over the past two years, most of them serving its own Starlink satellite business.
The Mask company also developing the next generation Starship rocketa stainless steel behemoth designed to be reusable and designed to carry out a variety of missions, including missions to the Moon and Mars and expansion of SpaceX's Starlink satellite network.
