Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn made its third flight on Sunday, showcasing the company’s first successful orbital-class booster reflight, but the mission ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos’s flagship rocket — a critical part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program.
The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 a.m. EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, commencing a gradual ascent from its pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
The core engines, each delivering more than half a million pounds of thrust, accelerated the vehicle past Mach in roughly a minute and a half. About three minutes into flight, the booster shut down its engines and separated from New Glenn’s upper stage, which continued under two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
The first stage followed a downrange parabolic trajectory, briefly reaching space before steering itself toward Blue Origin’s offshore landing platform about 400 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. It relit its motors for two braking burns and touched down on the ship in a smoky but accurate landing less than 10 minutes after liftoff.
The touchdown completed the booster’s second flight — the vehicle, named Never Tell Me The Odds, made its debut with a successful launch and recovery on Blue Origin’s previous New Glenn mission in November. Blue Origin, founded and owned by Jeff Bezos, has repeatedly landed and reused its smaller New Shepard suborbital booster, but New Glenn is much larger and more demanding. It flies to higher altitudes, reaches greater speeds, and is roughly three times the height of New Shepard.
Technicians installed new engines on the booster for Sunday’s mission, though Blue Origin intends to reuse the engines from the November flight on future New Glenn missions, CEO Dave Limp said.
New Glenn gives Blue Origin access to a broader market for launches to low Earth orbit and beyond. SpaceX has demonstrated it can refurbish and relaunch a Falcon 9 booster in as little as nine days, and can fly Falcon 9s five or more times in a week by operating a fleet of reusable boosters across three active pads. Blue Origin executives expect that reusing New Glenn boosters will allow them to achieve a significantly higher launch tempo.
