Blue Origin landed its New Glenn booster on an ocean barge for the first time Thursday, a step that moved Jeff Bezos’ rocket company into more direct competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its reusable rockets. The landing followed New Glenn’s launch of NASA’s Escapade mission toward Mars.
New Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:55 p.m. ET with the twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers) probes bound for deep space.
The mission had been postponed earlier in the week when elevated solar activity forced NASA to stop a planned attempt over concerns that high-energy particles could interfere with the spacecraft’s electronics.
“It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a statement. “This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
Roughly three minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s stages separated and the booster began its descent toward Blue Origin’s recovery ship Jacklyn, stationed about 375 miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. Seven minutes into flight, three of the booster’s BE-4 engines reignited for the final braking burn before the stage settled onto the deck.
The achievement came after a failed attempt in January, when the booster’s BE-4 engines rotated into position for landing but did not ignite.
SpaceX established the model for this type of recovery nearly a decade ago when Musk pushed the Falcon 9 program to return boosters to land and drone ships.
Blue Origin designed New Glenn, which stands more than 320 feet tall and can carry between 13 and 45 metric tons, to support at least 25 missions as it competes in the private space travel industry dominated by SpaceX.
For NASA, however, the primary goal was getting the Escapade mission off the ground. The twin spacecraft, built by California-based Rocket Lab and UC Berkeley, will spend a year in a looping orbit around Earth before beginning its trip to Mars in 2026.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” UC Berkeley ESCAPADE principal investigator Robert Lillis said in a statement.
The probes are scheduled to arrive in 2027 and spend about 11 months studying how the solar wind strips away the planet’s atmosphere.
Thursday’s flight also moved Blue Origin closer to challenging SpaceX for government and commercial contracts, including Amazon’s Project Kuiper, as the race to Mars heats up.
"This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface,” NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement. “All of this information will be critical to protect future NASA explorers and invaluable as we evaluate how to deliver on President Trump’s vision of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.”
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