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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket came back home after taking aim at Mars

blue origin, escapade, launch, NASA, new glenn, ng-2, reusable rockets, rocket lab, Science, Space / Mike M. / November 14, 2025

“Never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try.”

Blue Origin’s 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Credit: Blue Origin

The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3: 55 pm EST (20: 55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.

“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”

The two-stage launcher set off for space carrying two NASA science probes on a two-year journey to Mars, marking the first time any operational satellites flew on Blue Origin’s new rocket, named for the late NASA astronaut John Glenn. The New Glenn hit its marks on the climb into space, firing seven BE-4 main engines for nearly three minutes on a smooth ascent through blue skies over Florida’s Space Coast.

Seven BE-4 engines power New Glenn downrange from Florida’s Space Coast. Credit: Blue Origin

The engines consumed super-cold liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen, producing more than 3.8 million pounds of thrust at full power. The BE-4s shut down, and the first stage booster released the rocket’s second stage, with dual hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines, to continue the mission into orbit.

The booster soared to an altitude of 79 miles (127 kilometers), then began a controlled plunge back into the atmosphere, targeting a landing on Blue Origin’s offshore recovery vessel named Jacklyn. Moments later, three of the booster’s engines reignited to slow its descent in the upper atmosphere. Then, moments before reaching the Atlantic, the rocket again lit three engines and extended its landing gear, sinking through low-level clouds before settling onto the football field-size deck of Blue Origin’s recovery platform 375 miles (600 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral.

A pivotal moment

The moment of touchdown appeared electric at several Blue Origin facilities around the country, which had live views of cheering employees piped in to the company’s webcast of the flight. This was the first time any company besides SpaceX has propulsively landed an orbital-class rocket booster, coming nearly 10 years after SpaceX recovered its first Falcon 9 booster intact in December 2015.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn landing also came almost exactly a decade after the company landed its smaller suborbital New Shepard rocket for the first time in West Texas. Just like Thursday’s New Glenn landing, Blue Origin successfully recovered the New Shepard on its second-ever attempt.

Blue Origin’s heavy-lifter launched successfully for the first time in January. But technical problems prevented the booster from restarting its engines on descent, and the first stage crashed at sea. Engineers made “propellant management and engine bleed control improvements” to resolve the problems, and the fixes appeared to work Thursday.

The rocket recovery is a remarkable achievement for Blue Origin, which has long lagged dominant SpaceX in the commercial launch business. SpaceX has now logged 532 landings with its Falcon booster fleet. Now, with just a single recovery in the books, Blue Origin sits at second in the rankings for propulsive landings of orbit-class boosters. Bezos’ company has amassed 34 landings of the suborbital New Shepard model, which lacks the size and doesn’t reach the altitude and speed of the New Glenn booster.

Blue Origin landed a New Shepard returning from space for the first time in November 2015, a few weeks before SpaceX first recovered a Falcon 9 booster. Bezos threw shade on SpaceX with a post on Twitter, now called X, after the first Falcon 9 landing: “Welcome to the club!”

Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder and owner, wrote this message on Twitter following SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 landing on December 21, 2015. Credit: X/Jeff Bezos

Finally, after Thursday, Blue Origin officials can say they are part of the same reusable rocket club as SpaceX. Within a few days, Blue Origin’s recovery vessel is expected to return to Port Canaveral, Florida, where ground crews will offload the New Glenn booster and move it to a hangar for inspections and refurbishment.

“Today was a tremendous achievement for the New Glenn team, opening a new era for Blue Origin and the industry as we look to launch, land, repeat, again and again,” said Jordan Charles, the company’s vice president for the New Glenn program, in a statement. “We’ve made significant progress on manufacturing at rate and building ahead of need. Our primary focus remains focused on increasing our cadence and working through our manifest.”

Blue Origin plans to reuse the same booster next year for the first launch of the company’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar cargo lander. This mission is currently penciled in to be next on Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch schedule. Eventually, the company plans to have a fleet of reusable boosters, like SpaceX has with the Falcon 9, that can each be flown up to 25 times.

New Glenn is a core element in Blue Origin’s architecture for NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The rocket will eventually launch human-rated lunar landers to the Moon to provide astronauts with rides to and from the surface of the Moon.

The US Space Force will also examine the results of Thursday’s launch to assess New Glenn’s readiness to begin launching military satellites. The military selected Blue Origin last year to join SpaceX and United Launch Alliance as a third launch provider for the Defense Department.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn booster, 23 feet (7 meters) in diameter, on the deck of the company’s landing platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

Slow train to Mars

The mission wasn’t over with the buoyant landing in the Atlantic. New Glenn’s second stage fired its engines twice to propel itself on a course toward deep space, setting up for deployment of NASA’s two ESCAPADE satellites a little more than a half-hour after liftoff.

The identical satellites were released from their mounts on top of the rocket to begin their nearly two-year journey to Mars, where they will enter orbit to survey how the solar wind interacts with the rarefied uppermost layers of the red planet’s atmosphere. Scientists believe radiation from the Sun gradually stripped away Mars’ atmosphere, driving runaway climate change that transitioned the planet from a warm, habitable world to the global inhospitable desert seen today.

“I’m both elated and relieved to see NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft healthy post-launch and looking forward to the next chapter of their journey to help us understand Mars’ dynamic space weather environment,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley.

Scientists want to understand the environment at the top of the Martian atmosphere to learn more about what drove this change. With two instrumented spacecraft, ESCAPADE will gather data from different locations around Mars, providing a series of multipoint snapshots of solar wind and atmospheric conditions. Another NASA spacecraft, named MAVEN, has collected similar data since arriving in orbit around Mars in 2014, but it is only a single observation post.

ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, was developed and launched on a budget of about $80 million, a bargain compared to all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. The spacecraft were built by Rocket Lab, and the project is managed on behalf of NASA by the University of California, Berkeley.

The two spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab’s factory in Long Beach, California. Credit: Rocket Lab

NASA paid Blue Origin about $20 million for the launch of ESCAPADE, significantly less than it would have cost to launch it on any other dedicated rocket. The space agency accepted the risk of launching on the relatively unproven New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the Space Force for the government’s marquee space missions.

The mission was supposed to launch last year, when Earth and Mars were in the right positions to enable a direct trip between the planets. But Blue Origin delayed the launch, forcing a yearlong wait until the company’s second New Glenn was ready to fly. Now, the ESCAPADE satellites, each about a half-ton in mass fully fueled, will loiter in a unique orbit more than a million miles from Earth until next November, when they will set off for the red planet. ESCAPADE will arrive at Mars in September 2027 and begin its science mission in 2028.

Rocket Lab ground controllers established communication with the ESCAPADE satellites late Thursday night.

“The ESCAPADE mission is part of our strategy to understand Mars’ past and present so we can send the first astronauts there safely,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding Martian space weather is a top priority for future missions because it helps us protect systems, robots, and most importantly, humans, in extreme environments.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Here’s how orbital dynamics wizardry helped save NASA’s next Mars mission

blue origin, Commercial space, escapade, launch, Mars, NASA, new glenn, ng-2, planetary science, rocket lab, Science, solar system, Space, uc berkeley / Shannon Garcia / November 9, 2025

Blue Origin is counting down to launch of its second New Glenn rocket Sunday.

The New Glenn rocket rolls to Launch Complex-36 in preparation for liftoff this weekend. Credit: Blue Origin

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The field of astrodynamics isn’t a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems trajectory analysts can pull a solution out of a hat.

That’s what it took to save NASA’s ESCAPADE mission from a lengthy delay, and possible cancellation, after its rocket wasn’t ready to send it toward Mars during its appointed launch window last year. ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, consists of two identical spacecraft setting off for the red planet as soon as Sunday with a launch aboard Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket.

“ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re launching outside the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. We are using a very flexible mission design approach where we go into a loiter orbit around Earth in order to sort of wait until Earth and Mars are lined up correctly in November of next year to go to Mars.”

This wasn’t the original plan. When it was first designed, ESCAPADE was supposed to take a direct course from Earth to Mars, a transit that typically takes six to nine months. But ESCAPADE will now depart the Earth when Mars is more than 220 million miles away, on the opposite side of the Solar System.

The payload fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, containing NASA’s two Mars-bound science probes. Credit: Blue Origin

The most recent Mars launch window was last year, and the next one doesn’t come until the end of 2026. The planets are not currently in alignment, and the proverbial stars didn’t align to get the ESCAPADE satellites and their New Glenn rocket to the launch pad until this weekend.

This is fine

But there are several reasons this is perfectly OK to NASA. The New Glenn rocket is overkill for this mission. The two-stage launcher could send many tons of cargo to Mars, but NASA is only asking it to dispatch about a ton of payload, comprising a pair of identical science probes designed to study how the planet’s upper atmosphere interacts with the solar wind.

But NASA got a good deal from Blue Origin. The space agency is paying Jeff Bezos’ space company about $20 million for the launch, less than it would for a dedicated launch on any other rocket capable of sending the ESCAPADE mission to Mars. In exchange, NASA is accepting a greater than usual chance of a launch failure. This is, after all, just the second flight of the 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force.

The ESCAPADE mission, itself, was developed with a modest budget, at least by the standards of interplanetary exploration. The mission’s total cost amounts to less than $80 million, an order of magnitude lower than all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. NASA officials would not entrust the second flight of the New Glenn rocket to launch a billion-dollar spacecraft, but the risk calculation changes as costs go down.

NASA knew all of this in 2023 when it signed a launch contract with Blue Origin for the ESCAPADE mission. What officials didn’t know was that the New Glenn rocket wouldn’t be ready to fly when ESCAPADE needed to launch in late 2024. It turned out Blue Origin didn’t launch the first New Glenn test flight until January of this year. It was a success. It took another 10 months for engineers to get the second New Glenn vehicle to the launch pad.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft undergoing final preparations for launch. Each spacecraft is about a half-ton fully fueled. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Aiming high

That’s where the rocket sits this weekend at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. If all goes according to plan, New Glenn will take off Sunday afternoon during an 88-minute launch window opening at 2: 45 pm EST (19: 45 UTC). There is a 65 percent chance of favorable weather, according to Blue Origin.

Blue Origin’s launch team, led by launch director Megan Lewis, will oversee the countdown Sunday. The rocket will be filled with super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants beginning about four-and-a-half hours prior to liftoff. After some final technical and weather checks, the terminal countdown sequence will commence at T-minus 4 minutes, culminating in ignition of the rocket’s seven BE-4 main engines at T-minus 5.6 seconds.

The rocket’s flight computer will assess the health of each of the powerful engines, combining to generate more than 3.8 million pounds of thrust. If all looks good, hold-down restraints will release to allow the New Glenn rocket to begin its ascent from Florida’s Space Coast.

Heading east, the rocket will surpass the speed of sound in a little over a minute. After soaring through the stratosphere, New Glenn will shut down its seven booster engines and shed its first stage a little more than 3 minutes into the flight. Twin BE-3U engines, burning liquid hydrogen, will ignite to finish the job of sending the ESCAPADE satellites toward deep space. The rocket’s trajectory will send the satellites toward a gravitationally-stable location beyond the Moon, called the L2 Lagrange point, where it will swing into a loosely-bound loiter orbit to wait for the right time to head for Mars.

Meanwhile, the New Glenn booster, itself measuring nearly 20 stories tall, will begin maneuvers to head toward Blue Origin’s recovery ship floating a few hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. The final part of the descent will include a landing burn using three of the BE-4 engines, then downshifting to a single engine to control the booster’s touchdown on the landing platform, dubbed “Jacklyn” in honor of Bezos’ late mother.

The launch timeline for New Glenn’s second mission. Credit: Blue Origin

New Glenn’s inaugural launch at the start of this year was a success, but the booster’s descent did not go well. The rocket was unable to restart its engines, and it crashed into the sea.

“We’ve incorporated a number of changes to our propellant management system, some minor hardware changes as well, to increase our likelihood of landing that booster on this mission,” said Laura Maginnis, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn mission management. “That was the primary schedule driver that kind of took us from from January to where we are today.”

Blue Origin officials are hopeful they can land the booster this time. The company’s optimism is enough for officials to have penciled in a reflight of this particular booster on the very next New Glenn launch, slated for the early months of next year. That launch is due to send Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon cargo lander to the Moon.

“Our No. 1 objective is to deliver ESCAPADE safely and successfully on its way to L2, and then eventually on to Mars,” Maginnis said in a press conference Saturday. “We also are planning and wanting to land our booster. If we don’t land the booster, that’s OK. We have several more vehicles in production. We’re excited to see how the mission plays out tomorrow.”

Tracing a kidney bean

ESCAPADE’s path through space, relative to the Earth, has the peculiar shape of a kidney bean. In the world of astrodynamics, this is called a staging or libration orbit. It’s a way to keep the spacecraft on a stable trajectory to wait for the opportunity to go to Mars late next year.

“ESCAPADE has identified that this is the way that we want to fly, so we launch from Earth onto this kidney bean-shaped orbit,” said Jeff Parker, a mission designer from the Colorado-based company Advanced Space. “So, we can launch on virtually any day. What happens is that kidney bean just grows and shrinks based on how much time you need to spend in that orbit. So, we traverse that kidney been and at the very end there’s a final little loop-the-loop that brings us down to Earth.”

That’s when the two ESCAPADE spacecraft, known as Blue and Gold, will pass a few hundred miles above our planet. At the right moment, on November 7 and 9 of next year, the satellites will fire their engines to set off for Mars.

An illustration of ESCAPADE’s trajectory to wait for the opportunity to go to Mars. Credit: UC-Berkeley

There are some tradeoffs with this unique staging orbit. It is riskier than the original plan of sending ESCAPADE straight to Mars. The satellites will be exposed to more radiation, and will consume more of their fuel just to get to the red planet, eating into reserves originally set aside for science observations.

The satellites were built by Rocket Lab, which designed them with extra propulsion capacity in order to accommodate launches on a variety of different rockets. In the end, NASA “judged that the risk for the mission was acceptable, but it certainly is higher risk,” said Richard French, Rocket Lab’s vice president of business development and strategy.

The upside of the tradeoff is it will demonstrate an “exciting and flexible way to get to Mars,” Lillis said. “In the future, if we’d like to send hundreds of spacecraft to Mars at once, it will be difficult to do that from just the launch pads we have on Earth within that month [of the interplanetary launch window]. We could potentially queue up spacecraft using the approach that ESCAPADE is pioneering.”

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