Blue Origin achieved another significant milestone in its quest for spaceflight dominance: successfully landing its New Glenn rocket booster after Thursday’s launch. This feat, while impressive on its own, carries particular weight because it places the fledgling company directly in competition with the already-established leader: SpaceX.
The successful landing of “Never Tell Me the Odds” – the booster name chosen by Blue Origin employees – comes just weeks after a similar effort ended in an unsuccessful splashdown in January. This makes New Glenn only the second orbital-class rocket to successfully land its booster, following in the footsteps of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which has mastered this maneuver since 2013.
Landing these massive boosters is more than just a flashy display; it dramatically cuts down on launch costs by allowing for reuse.
“New Glenn is the rocket that, at the moment, shows the most promise for competing against the near monopoly that SpaceX has been able to acquire in the medium- and heavy-lift launch market,” stated Greg Autry, provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida. This underscores the strategic importance Blue Origin is placing on booster reusability as it aims to carve out a larger share of the lucrative space transportation market.
The New Glenn rocket, standing nearly 190 feet tall with a diameter of 23 feet, towers over its Falcon 9 competitor (which stands at 135 feet tall and 12 feet wide). Landing such a large booster presents an added technical challenge. “Recovering an orbital-class rocket is incredibly hard,” remarked Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president for Falcon launch vehicles, offering congratulations on the achievement via X (formerly Twitter).
Blue Origin’s Ambitious Plans
This successful launch was not solely about booster recovery. The primary objective was deploying ESCAPADE, a NASA mission consisting of twin spacecraft tasked with studying Mars’ magnetic fields and charged particle interactions.
These two identical spacecraft – aptly named “Blue” and “Gold” – first executed a maneuver around the Lagrange-2 point in space (a gravitationally balanced area between Earth and the sun). Later this month, they will use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to propel themselves onto a trajectory toward Mars.
While Blue Origin has celebrated its recent launch milestones with fervor (“Launch, land, repeat — it starts today,” declared Eddie Seyffert, a Blue Origin commentator during the livestream), SpaceX remains the dominant force in commercial spaceflight. Despite facing near-bankruptcy before achieving its first successful rocket launch in 2008, SpaceX secured lucrative NASA contracts for cargo and astronaut transportation to the International Space Station and deployed thousands of Starlink internet satellites. Its Falcon 9 boosters have been recovered over 500 times, with some models exceeding 30 launches each.
Blue Origin’s upcoming schedule includes a large robotic moon lander slated for next year. The company’s long-term goals are clearly ambitious: capturing a larger slice of the market dominated by SpaceX while also advancing its independent constellation of internet satellites to challenge Starlink, now rebranded as Amazon Leo.
This successful New Glenn launch and landing is a testament to Blue Origin’s dedication to mastering this challenging technology. It marks a significant step forward in their journey to become a major player in the expanding commercial space sector.
