Blue Origin nails booster landing on second New Glenn launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Blue Origin launched its second New Glenn on Thursday, lofting a pair of NASA spacecraft bound for Mars and, for the first time, completing a vertical landing of the rocket’s first stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.

The 98-meter-tall rocket lifted off at 3:55 p.m. Eastern from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station into a mostly sunny autumn sky, with bright blue and red flames streaming from the booster’s seven BE-4 engines. The booster separated from the second stage about 4 minutes later, fell back toward Earth and ignited its engines to slow its descent. Smoke obscured the barge as the booster approached, then cleared to show it standing intact and upright.

“A landed orbital rocket. What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry,” Ariane Cornell, vice president of New Glenn strategy and business operations, said on Blue’s live broadcast.

The first launch attempt Sunday was scrubbed due to rain and clouds in the area, and NASA canceled a Wednesday attempt due to concerns that radiation from a solar storm could damage the spacecraft shortly after launch.

During New Glenn’s debut in January, Blue Origin had achieved its primary goal of reaching orbit, but the booster was lost during its landing attempt at sea. Today’s landing is a step toward the company’s longer-term goal of reusability and makes it only the second company to vertically land a booster. SpaceX has been landing and reusing Falcon boosters since 2015. United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab are among the operators that continue to research and test various recovery and reuse methods, and Rocket Lab has recovered a handful of boosters that splashed down in the sea under parachutes.

This launch puts Blue Origin in another rare class: Besides ULA’s Atlas V, New Glenn is the only U.S. heavy-lift rocket in operation that has launched spacecraft bound for Mars. The rocket carried two identical spacecraft — named Blue and Gold — for NASA’s ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, mission. The spacecraft are to follow an unusual trajectory to Mars, first spending a year orbiting around the L1 Lagrange Point until the orbits of Earth and Mars are aligned. If all goes as planned, they will enter the red planet’s in September 2027 to study how its atmosphere interacts with solar wind.

Also aboard New Glenn was a demonstration satellite for California company Viasat.

Seven BE-4 engines propelled New Glenn’s first stage, burning liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquid oxygen. The company says the BE-4 is the most powerful LNG-fueled engine ever flown. The second stage is powered by two BE-3U engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

Those propellants are integral to Blue’s larger space exploration ambitions, John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence, said Nov. 5 during the Economist’s Space Economy Summit in Orlando. The company decided to use liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen “from very early on,” he said, because “they can be derived from resources on the moon.”

NASA has contracted Blue Origin to send at least two landers to the lunar surface — a cargo Blue Moon Mark 1 that could launch later this year, and a crewed Blue Moon for the Artemis V astronaut landing, targeted for 2030.

Blue also has additional customers lined up. U.S. Space Systems Command in April awarded the company $2.4 billion in contracts to launch national security payloads under Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch initiative, pending the certification of New Glenn by the U.S. Space Force.

Blue hasn’t said if it intends to reuse the booster from this flight, but New Glenn first stages are designed for a minimum of 25 flights each. And the company is already building up a ready supply:

“We’ve got several more New Glenn boosters already in production,” CEO David Limp posted on X the week before the launch.