Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket with two Mars-bound satellites

The giant New Glenn rocket from Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin launched from Florida on Thursday on its first mission to paying customers, sending two NASA satellites toward Mars while also landing its reusable booster for the first time.

The powerful two-stage rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, marking the first mission of any kind flown by Blue Origin since the inaugural New Glenn vehicle, NG-1. in january 2025,

With Thursday’s launch, Blue Origin has delivered its first science payload to space for NASA or any customer, a milestone in the company’s quest to compete on a more equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the world’s leading rocket launch service.

A live webcast from Blue Origin showed the rocket climbing from its launch tower into a clear afternoon sky amid a roar of flames and clouds of steam as its seven BE-4 liquid-fuel engines fired. The launch was delayed by several days due to cloudy skies. a geomagnetic storm,

About 10 minutes after liftoff, the 17-story-tall New Glenn first-stage booster returned to the deck of a barge floating in the Atlantic, achieving a key reusability objective for Blue Origin, which was spearheaded by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The first attempt at such a landing in January failed.

Blue Origin’s Rocket Park Mission Control Center in Cape Canaveral cheered as video showed the landing of the booster, dubbed “Never Tell Me the Odds” in reference to a line spoken by Star Wars hero Han Solo in the film. Empire Strikes Back,

Approximately 20 minutes later, Mission Control confirmed that New Glenn’s upper stage had achieved its primary mission – deployment. NASA’s twin EscaPADE spacecraft Into outer space to begin a 22-month journey to Mars.

Blue Origin vice president Ariane Cornell praised the launch, calling it the beginning of “the next era of spaceflight for Blue Origin.”

space weather environmental studies

Two NASA spacecraft, called Blue and Gold, will arrive at Mars in 2027 and enter synchronous elliptical orbits for an 11-month study of the planet’s space weather environment.

Instruments aboard the satellites will analyze how solar winds – fluctuating streams of high-energy charged particles from the Sun – interact with the relatively weak Martian magnetic field and how this interaction may contribute to 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 the California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab, with equipment supplied by the University of California, Berkeley.

The rocket also carried a secondary payload from satellite company Viasat that remained attached to its upper stage for a technical demonstration of a space communications relay above Earth.

When the rocket made its first flight in January, it carried Blue Origin’s own payload into space, a prototype of its maneuverable Blue Ring spacecraft that it is developing for the Pentagon and commercial customers.

Musk’s competition with SpaceX

Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, was until recently known primarily for its space tourism business, taking wealthy passengers to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocketship. The single-stage reusable vehicle has also carried more than 200 research experiments inside its capsule.

Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars developing New Glenn, a heavy-lift class rocket designed to be the company’s workhorse vehicle for carrying people and cargo to orbit.

In the name of John Glenn, First American to orbit the EarthThe spacecraft produces twice as much thrust as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and is very similar to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy vehicle, while offering more cargo room than its rivals.

NASA has spent about $55 million for the EscaPADE mission — a modest price relative to the agency’s multibillion-dollar space programs — and paid Blue Origin $18 million for the New Glenn flight, federal procurement data showed.

Blue Origin also supplies engines for other companies’ rockets, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, and is working on a crewed moon lander for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, as well as a space station in collaboration with other entities.

Blue Origin still has a long way to go to catch up with SpaceX, which has launched its Falcon rockets on about 280 missions during the past two years, most of them serving its own Starlink satellite business.

Musk also has a company is developing its next generation Starship rocketA stainless steel behemoth that is designed to be completely reusable and carry out multiple missions, including flights to the Moon and Mars and expanding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.