Blue Origin Marks First Ocean Landing of New Glenn Booster After Second Attempt

Blue Origin has landed theirs New Glenn Booster on an ocean boat for the first time Thursday, a step that moved Jeff Bezos’ rocket company into more direct competition with Elon Musk. SpaceX and its reusable rockets. The landing followed the launch of New Glenn of NASA’s Escapade mission to Mars.

New Glenn got up from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:55 pm ET with the double ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers) probes bound to deep space.

The mission had been postponed earlier in the week when heightened solar activity forced NASA to halt a planned attempt over concerns that high-energy particles could interfere with the spacecraft’s electronics.

“You see Never Tell Me The Odds had perfect odds – never before in history has such a large booster hit the landing on the second try,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a declaration. “This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight rate and continue to deliver for our customers.”

About three minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s stages separated and the booster began its descent toward Blue Origin’s Jacklyn recovery ship, stationed about 375 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. Seven minutes into the flight, three of the booster’s BE-4 engines reignite for the final brake burn before the cover settles on the deck.

Success came after a failed attempt in January, when the booster’s BE-4 engines rotated into position for landing, but failed to ignite.

SpaceX set the model for this type of recovery almost a decade ago when Musk pushed the Falcon 9 program to return boosters to earth and drone ships.

Blue Origin designed New Glenn, which is more than 320 meters tall and can carry between 13 and 45 metric tons, to support at least 25 missions while competing in the private space travel industry dominated by SpaceX.

For NASA, however, the primary goal was to get the Escapade mission off the ground. The twin spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab in California and UC Berkeley, will spend a year in a looping orbit around Earth before beginning its journey to Mars in 2026.

“Understanding how the ionosphere changes is going to be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in the radio signals that we need to communicate with each other and navigate to Mars,” said Robert Lillis, UC Berkeley ESCAPADE principal investigator. declaration.

The probes are scheduled to arrive in 2027 and spend about 11 months studying how the solar wind strips the planet’s atmosphere.

Thursday’s flight also brought Blue Origin closer to challenging SpaceX for government and commercial contracts, including Amazon’s Kuiper Project, as the race to Mars heats up.

“This heliophysical 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 protecting future NASA explorers and invaluable as we evaluate how to achieve President Trump’s vision of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.”