Jeff Bezos Blue Origin Space Venture today sent the twin orbiters on the first leg of their journey to Mars, marking a successful sequel to the first liftoff of the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn launch vehicle in January.
The trouble-free launch of NASA’s Escapade probes, and today’s first recovery of a New Glenn booster, cemented Blue Origin’s status as a worthy competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has come to dominate the space industry. SpaceX is the only other company to successfully bring back an orbital-class booster.
New Glenn — named after John Glenn, the first American in orbit — lifted off from the launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT). Today’s liftoff follows efforts earlier this week that had to be scrapped, initially due to cloudy weather on Earth and then a solar storm in space.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket
Minutes after New Glen took off, the mission plan called for the rocket’s first-stage booster to return to a touchdown in the Atlantic on a floating platform named Jacqueline after Bezos’ late mother. Blue Origin’s first attempt to retrieve a New Glenn booster failed in January — but this time, the trick succeeded.
The achievement was greeted by wild cheers from Blue Origin team members, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control and the crowd at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The uncertainty of recovering the booster was reflected in its nickname: “Never Tell Me the Odds”.
“Congratulations, Team Blue – you did it!” Launch commentator Ariane Cornell, New Glenn vice president of strategy and business operations, said during the webcast. “What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry.”
Cornell’s co-host for the webcast, Tabitha Lipkin, was similarly enthusiastic. “I feel like I’m hitting my hand on the table too much,” she said.
Meanwhile, New Glenn’s second stage moves into orbit. A little more than half an hour after launch, the second stage deployed two robotic spacecraft NASA’s Escapade mission to Mars. (The $78.5 million mission name is an acronym for “ESCApe and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer”.)
The twin probes will follow a loitering, looping trajectory that includes an Earth flyby a year from now. This slingshot technique will provide an extra boost to put the spacecraft into Mars orbit in 2027. Once the probes settle into synchronized orbits, they will fly in formation to map the Red Planet’s magnetic field, upper atmosphere and ionosphere in stereo. The science mission will last until 2029.
Escapade should help NASA prepare for future crewed missions to Mars, scientists say.
“Understanding how the ionosphere changes will be an important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we need to communicate with each other and navigate to Mars,” said lead investigator Robert Lillis, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. A press release said. Findings from Escapade could help scientists develop ways to deal with radiation risks associated with missions to Mars.
From a space science perspective, Escapade could shed light on the process by which Mars has lost much of its atmosphere over billions of years. “Understanding how the solar wind drives different types of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of Martian climate evolution,” Lillis said.
NASA has put UC-Berkeley in charge of operating the probes, which are named blue and gold in honor of Berkeley’s school colors. Rocket Lab USA built the spacecraft and Blue Origin won the launch order in 2023, two years before New Glenn ever flew.Escapade was originally scheduled for liftoff a year ago, but NASA postponed the start of the mission citing the potential cost of a launch delay that “could be caused by a number of factors” — possibly including a scenario where Blue Origin’s rocket was not yet ready for liftoff. The additional delay comes as Blue Origin follows lessons learned from January’s first New Glen launch.
In addition to launching the Escaped probe, New Glenn carries demonstration hardware for it ViaSat’s HaloNet telemetry relay service. Halonet was tested as part of a program aimed at switching space communications channels from NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, or TDRS, to commercial satellites.
A Post-launch press releases“We achieved complete mission success today, and I’m proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin.
“It turns out Never Tell Me the Odds had perfect odds — never before in history has landing on the second try been such a big booster,” Limp said. “This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue to deliver for our customers.”
New Glenn is designed to send payloads up to 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit and smaller payloads to destinations beyond Earth orbit. This makes the rocket more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket (23 metric tons to LEO), but less powerful than Falcon Heavy (64 metric tons) or Starship (100 to 150 metric tons). Starship is still in development; A modified version of that rocket Currently due to carry NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in the 2027-2028 timeframe.
John Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, congratulated Blue Origin after today’s launch: “Recovering an orbital-class rocket is incredibly difficult. Well done!” He wrote in X. “As Americans we should be very proud of what we are accomplishing in space.”
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy added his congratulations. “This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert and how solar flares affect the Martian surface,” Duffy said in a written statement. “Each launch of New Glenn provides data that will be essential when we launch MK-1 via Artemis. All of this information will be critical and invaluable to protecting future NASA astronauts as we evaluate how to deliver on President Trump’s vision of putting the stars and stripes on Mars.”
Within the next few monthsBlue Origin plans to use New Glen to launch an uncrewed Blue Moon MK-1 Lander in the south polar region of the Moon. And thanks to today’s successful recovery at sea, “Never Tell Me the Odds” can be reused as a first-stage booster for that launch.
This report has been updated with comments from Dave Limp and Sean Duffy.