New Glenn, the heavy rocket from Blue Origin, the space corporations led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, successfully recovered its first-stage booster, marking a full-fledged entry into the reusable rocket market. Observers said it delivered a meaningful result in a field long dominated by Elon Musk's SpaceX, firing a signal flare for a shift in the competitive landscape.
According to Blue Origin's live broadcast, the New Glenn rocket lifted off at 3:55 p.m. on the 13th (local time) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. About 98 meters tall, New Glenn is named after John Glenn, the first U.S. astronaut, and is the model Blue Origin has developed as the core of its next-generation launch vehicle strategy.
About nine minutes after liftoff, the first-stage booster for reuse touched down vertically on an offshore platform about 600 km from the coast. Blue Origin aired the scene live, and amid cheers from employees, Jeff Bezos was also said to have watched the successful recovery moment from the launch control room.
During the first test flight in January, Blue Origin succeeded in reaching orbit but failed to recover the booster. However, this flight is seen as having raised the reliability of its reuse technology by a notch.
Then, about 20 minutes after launch, two twin uncrewed probes, ESCAPADE, the primary objective of this mission, were deployed from the rocket's upper stage into space. NASA plans to use these spacecraft to study how the solar wind interacts with Mars' magnetic environment and how that process accelerates the loss of the Martian atmosphere. This is the first time a Blue Origin rocket has been used for a NASA mission.
Over about the next year, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will wait in a near-Earth orbit about 1.5 million km away, then begin their journey to Mars in the fall of next year when Earth and Mars are optimally aligned. The goal is to arrive in Mars orbit in 2027 and begin full-scale observation in 2028.