Blue Origin achieved a major milestone Thursday as its New Glenn rocket soared from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and successfully returned its first stage to a floating platform, marking a crucial step in the company’s push for reusable launch vehicles. The flight carried two NASA-backed satellites destined for a circuitous journey to Mars.
The towering rocket lifted off just before 4 p.m. ET, sending the twin Escapade spacecraft into space after days of delay. Cloud cover forced Blue Origin to postpone Sunday’s initial launch plan, and the company later worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to secure a new window amid a ban on most daytime launches during the government shutdown.
Escapade, short for “Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers,” marked the first customer payload to fly aboard New Glenn. The rocket performed its debut mission in January with internal demonstration hardware but failed to recover its first-stage booster during that flight. Blue Origin attributed the setback to engines that did not properly reignite.
This time, the booster performed flawlessly, touching down on the seafaring barge Jacklyn, named after Jeff Bezos’ mother. The success brings New Glenn closer to competing with SpaceX, whose reusable Falcon rockets have dominated the commercial launch market.
Blue Origin said it spent the past ten months refining New Glenn’s design to ensure a successful landing, highlighting that booster recovery and reuse are essential to lowering costs and scaling future missions. While rocket landings do not determine the primary mission’s success, they remain central to the company’s long-term strategy.
For this high-profile flight, New Glenn delivered the twin Escapade satellites toward Lagrange Point 2, or L2, a gravitational sweet spot roughly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The satellites will remain there temporarily, using the location as an orbital layover until Mars moves closer to Earth in late 2026.
From L2, the spacecraft will swing past Earth again and set course for the red planet. Both are expected to enter Martian orbit in September 2027.
Led by the University of California, Berkeley, the science mission aims to study Mars’ upper atmosphere and magnetosphere to better understand how the planet lost its once-thick atmosphere. “Throughout the Escapade mission, the two satellites will take simultaneous measurements from nearly the planet’s entire upper atmosphere and magnetosphere, ranging from altitudes between approximately 100 and 6,200 miles,” UC Berkeley said in a news release. “Coordinated, multipoint observations are necessary to … unravel the chain of cause and effect within the system.”
Escapade forms part of NASA’s SIMPLEx program, which encourages the use of small and low cost spacecraft for ambitious scientific investigations. The mission’s budget came in under $100 million, far lower than the typical $300 million to $600 million price tags of other Martian satellites.
With Thursday’s success, Blue Origin moves closer to commercial readiness for New Glenn as it works to challenge entrenched competitors and secure a greater share of deep space missions.
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