Blue Origin notched a milestone in its heavy-lift ambitions on Thursday with the successful launch of its second New Glenn rocket, a towering 321-foot behemoth designed to anchor Jeff Bezos’ long-term vision for reusable spaceflight. The mission dispatched two small NASA satellites onto a complex, years-long journey to Mars, where they will study how the Sun has slowly stripped the planet of its atmosphere.
Credit: Jeff Bezos/ Blue Origin
Lifting off at 3:55 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, New Glenn’s seven BE-4 methane engines roared to life with 3.8 million pounds of thrust. The booster climbed into clear afternoon skies, greeted by cheers from Blue Origin employees watching from viewing sites miles away. The ascent marked a triumphant end to a four-day delay caused not only by stormy weather on Florida’s Space Coast but also by a powerful solar storm that had flooded Earth’s upper atmosphere with energetic radiation—conditions that threatened both the rocket and its payloads.
By Thursday, the solar storm had eased, giving Blue Origin the green light for its second attempt at launching the next-generation heavy-lift vehicle.
A Redeeming Landing for New Glenn
New Glenn’s debut flight in January successfully placed a payload into orbit, but its first-stage booster failed to reach its offshore landing vessel, the Jacklyn, named after Bezos’ mother. This second flight marked a critical retest of the reusable booster system.
The New Glenn first stage standing on the deck of Blue Origin’s recovery vessel Jacklyn. Credit: Blue Origin.
The 188-foot first stage flown Thursday—nicknamed Never Tell Me The Odds—incorporated multiple upgrades to improve reliability and precision. After separation, the stage executed a three-engine braking burn, re-ignited just above the ocean for final deceleration, and then touched down on its landing ship using a single-engine hover-slam maneuver, much like SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
This time, the booster nailed its landing, prompting raucous celebration among the Blue Origin team. The company plans to tow the massive stage back to Port Canaveral for inspection and potential refurbishment ahead of future missions.
ESCAPADE Heads for Mars — Slowly, by Design
While the booster settled onto its drone ship, New Glenn’s upper stage pressed onward. After two precise engine burns, it placed its payload — NASA’s twin ESCAPADE probes — on a long, looping trajectory away from Earth. Thirty-three minutes after launch, the small satellites, named Blue and Gold, deployed into space.
Managed by UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and built by Rocket Lab, the ESCAPADE mission (short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) is part of NASA’s strategy to develop low-cost planetary missions. Its total price tag: $107.4 million, a fraction of the typical cost of large interplanetary spacecraft.
Originally planned to ride with NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe, the Mars-bound duo ultimately shifted to New Glenn’s schedule — but that meant launching outside a normal Mars window. Planetary launch windows open every two years, with the next ideal alignment in 2026.
Instead of waiting, mission planners crafted a unique alternative: the satellites will cruise a million miles from Earth, beyond the Moon, and linger in a wide “loiter orbit” for nearly a year. In late 2027, they’ll swing back past Earth — within 600 miles — for a gravity-assist slingshot that will finally send them toward Mars. Arrival is expected in September 2027.
“It’s a very flexible approach,” said principal investigator Robert Lillis. “ESCAPADE is pioneering a way to queue up spacecraft without needing to wait for a narrow launch window.”
Unlocking Mars’ Atmospheric Secrets
Though modest in size, ESCAPADE is built to answer big questions. Mars once had a thick atmosphere and global magnetic field, conditions that supported a warmer, wetter climate. But over billions of years, the Sun’s relentless solar wind and periodic storms have stripped away much of the Martian atmosphere.
Earlier missions have captured snapshots of this process — but never from two vantage points at once. That’s where Blue and Gold come in.
Working in coordinated orbits, the twin probes will measure how high-energy electrons and protons interact with Mars’ upper atmosphere, how plasma flows behave, and how solar storms accelerate atmospheric loss.
“We know atmospheric escape is a major driver for Mars’ climate evolution,” Lillis said. “But we’ve never been able to capture cause and effect simultaneously. With two spacecraft, we can finally do that.”
The probes will begin by flying in the same orbit at different separations, then shift to different altitudes to provide a stereo-like view of atmospheric escape.
For Blue Origin, the mission represents more than a successful Mars payload delivery. It demonstrates that New Glenn — years in development and critical to Bezos’ vision — is finally hitting its stride. A flawless booster landing underscores the company’s push for rapid reusability, putting New Glenn on a competitive trajectory with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Starship-class ambitions.
With its second flight now complete, New Glenn is poised to take on a growing manifest of commercial, government, and scientific missions — and Blue Origin’s march toward the era of reusable heavy-lift rockets continues to gather momentum.
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