Blue Origin launches New Glenn rocket on company’s first NASA-scale science mission

By Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -The Blue Origin space venture of billionaire Jeff Bezos launched its giant New Glenn rocket from Florida on Thursday on its debut flight for paying customers, carrying two satellites on their way to Mars in the company’s first NASA-scale science mission.

The powerful two-stage rocket, standing 32 stories tall, blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, marking the first mission flown by Blue Origin since New Glenn’s inaugural test launch on January 16.

A live Blue Origin webcast showed the rocket ascending from its launch tower in a roar of flames and billowing clouds of vapor moments after its seven BE-4 engines thundered to life, gulping more than 2,800 pounds (1,270 kg) of liquid fuel per second.

The launch followed several days of delays forced by cloudy skies and a geomagnetic storm.

If all goes as planned, New Glenn’s reusable first-stage booster will separate from the rocket’s upper stage a few minutes after launch for a return flight to Earth and an attempted landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean while the upper stage streaks higher. The return landing maneuver failed in January due to an engine malfunction. 

The primary mission of Thursday’s launch involves NASA’s twin EscaPADE spacecraft, designed to orbit Mars in tandem to analyze how solar winds – streams of high-energy charged particles from the sun – interact with the planet’s magnetic field and how that interaction might contribute to depletion of the thin Martian atmosphere.

The dual spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, were set to be released from the rocket’s upper-stage cargo bay about 30 minutes after launch for a 22-month voyage to Mars before going into satellite mode to begin an 11-month synchronized orbital study of the Red Planet’s space weather environment.

Satellite company Viasat also has a payload on board that will remain attached to the New Glenn rocket’s upper stage in a technical demonstration of an in-space communications relay above Earth.

PLAYING CATCH-UP WITH SPACEX 

EscaPADE – short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers – originally was slated to launch in October 2024, but was delayed for more than a year by setbacks in development of New Glenn.

When the rocket made its test flight in January, it carried Blue Origin’s own payload, a prototype for the maneuverable Blue Ring spacecraft that the company is developing for the Pentagon and commercial customers.

The Blue and Gold satellites were built for NASA by the California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab, with instruments supplied by the University of California, Berkeley.

Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, has until recently been known mainly for a space tourism business that flies wealthy passengers to the edge of space in the suborbital New Shepard, a smaller single-stage reusable vehicle that also has carried more than 200 research experiments inside its capsule.

If Thursday’s launch succeeds, EscaPADE would become the first science payload delivered to space by Blue Origin for a paying customer, a key milestone for the Bezos-owned company in its quest to compete on a more equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the world’s most active rocket launch service.

SpaceX has launched its Falcon rockets on nearly 280 missions during the past two years, most of them serving its own Starlink satellite business.

Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars over the past decade developing New Glenn, a heavy-lift rocket intended to be the company’s workhorse for carrying humans and cargo into space. Named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, it produces two times more thrust at liftoff than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and about the same as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy vehicle, while offering more cargo room than any of its rivals.

NASA paid roughly $55 million for the EscaPADE mission – a modest price-tag relative to the agency’s multibillion-dollar space programs – and has paid Blue Origin $18 million for the New Glenn flight, according to federal procurement data.

Blue Origin also supplies engines for other companies’ rockets, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. And it has been working on a crewed moon lander for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, as well as a space station in collaboration with other entities.

Blue Origin has far to go to catch up with SpaceX, which has launched several hundred Falcon 9 missions to become the world’s most dominant launch provider, rivaled only by China’s space program. 

Musk’s company also is developing its next-generation Starship rocket, a stainless steel behemoth designed to be fully reusable and serve an array of missions, including flights to the moon and Mars, and expanding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. Starship, once placed into service, would become the world’s most powerful rocket. 

(Reporting by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)