A New Titan Ascends
On the afternoon of November 13, 2025, after several days of frustrating delays, a new titan of American rocketry thundered to life at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The 322-foot-tall New Glenn rocket, its seven powerful main engines burning a clean, bright blue, majestically climbed from the historic Launch Complex 36. Its destination was interplanetary space, carrying a pair of spacecraft for NASA on the first leg of a long journey to Mars.
This mission, designated NG-2, was not just another launch. It was a moment of significant validation for Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company that had spent more than a decade developing the massive rocket. For years, New Glenn had been a “paper rocket,” an ambitious project on a distant horizon, its debut repeatedly pushed back from an original 2020 target. While competitors had come to dominate the launch industry, New Glenn remained a promise, its progress shielded by the company’s quiet, methodical nature.
This all changed in 2025. The rocket’s inaugural flight in January had successfully reached orbit, a significant achievement for a maiden voyage. But it had failed its secondary objective: the booster was lost during its landing attempt. This left a critical question unanswered, as the rocket’s entire business model was built on reusability.
The November launch answered that question. Minutes after the rocket’s second stage separated and continued its push to orbit, the 17-story-tall first-stage booster, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” began its fiery descent back through the atmosphere. It autonomously steered itself toward a landing platform, the Jacklyn, floating 375 miles away in the Atlantic Ocean. In a stunning display of controlled power, the massive booster reignited its engines, slowed from hypersonic speed, and settled perfectly onto the barge’s deck.
On the ground, cheers erupted. In a single, flawless flight, New Glenn had not only deployed a sensitive NASA science mission but had also achieved what only one other company in the world had ever done: propulsively land an orbital-class, heavy-lift booster.
The flight was a complete success. The twin NASA probes were on their way to Mars. The secondary Viasat payload was successfully deployed. And, most importantly, the booster was safe. This event marked the rocket’s true arrival. It was the moment Blue Origin’s long-standing company motto – Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously” – was fully realized. The slow, patient, and often-delayed steps had culminated in a ferocious, and successful, entry into the heavy-lift launch market. New Glenn was no longer a promise. It was an operational, reusable rocket, and as its launch commentator announced to the world, it was “open for business.”
The Vision Behind the Vehicle
To understand the New Glenn rocket, one must first understand the philosophy of the company that built it. The rocket itself is not the ultimate goal. It is a tool, a piece of heavy-moving equipment, and a single, critical component of a much larger, multi-generational vision.
Blue Origin’s official mission is “building a road to space for the benefit of Earth.” This isn’t just a marketing slogan; it’s the central engineering and business driver for the entire company. The long-term vision is a future where the solar system’s vast resources of energy and materials are harnessed to preserve Earth’s environment. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has long spoken of a future where heavy, polluting industries are moved off-planet, allowing Earth to be zoned for residential and light commercial use.
This grand, long-term vision can’t be achieved without first solving a fundamental problem: the high cost and low frequency of access to space. The company’s “road to space” is a literal transportation network, and New Glenn is its heavy-freight truck.
This strategic, step-by-step approach is embedded in the very names of the company’s vehicles. Each rocket is named after a pioneering American astronaut, and the names form a deliberate, progressive map of the company’s own technical journey.
The first rocket was New Shepard. Named for Alan Shepard, the first American to fly in space, this rocket is a suborbital vehicle. It’s designed to fly passengers and payloads to the edge of space, providing a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth. New Shepard was Blue Origin’s first step. It allowed the company to master the complex technologies of reusable rocketry, including vertical, propulsive booster landings and reliable liquid-hydrogen engines, on a smaller, suborbital scale. It has flown successfully dozens of times, carrying passengers and research payloads.
The second rocket, and the company’s orbital workhorse, is New Glenn. It is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. This name is no accident. It signifies the company’s second, much larger step: graduating from suborbital hops to orbital-class, heavy-lift capability. Where New Shepard was the testbed, New Glenn is the industrial-scale tool designed to carry the satellites, infrastructure, and, eventually, people needed to build a real economy in orbit.
The naming convention implies a clear future. The next logical step after orbiting the Earth is traveling to the Moon. While the company hasn’t officially named its next launch system, the legacy of the Apollo program provides a clear hint of what’s to come. New Glenn is the bridge, the essential “orbital” link between the company’s first suborbital steps and its ultimate destination: a permanent, sustainable human presence on the Moon and beyond.
Anatomy of New Glenn
New Glenn is an imposing vehicle, a physical manifestation of the scale required to build a road to space. It is a massive, two-stage rocket designed from the ground up for reusability, reliability, and a high launch cadence. Its entire architecture is a series of deliberate engineering choices aimed at servicing the coming decades of commercial and government space activity.
A 322-Foot, Two-Stage Architecture
By the numbers, New Glenn is one of the largest and most powerful rockets in operation. It stands 98 meters (322 feet) tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty. Its most defining physical characteristic is its 7-meter (23-foot) diameter. This enormous width, consistent from the base to the payload fairing, gives the rocket its “heavy-lift” designation and is a core part of its design.
The rocket is a two-stage-to-orbit vehicle. This means it’s essentially two rockets stacked on top of each other, each with a specific job. The first stage, or booster, is the massive lower portion. Its only job is to provide the immense thrust needed to push the entire vehicle off the launch pad and through the dense lower atmosphere, taking it to an altitude of roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles).
Once its fuel is spent, this first stage separates and begins its journey back to Earth for a landing. The second stage, which is lighter and more specialized, then ignites its own engines. This stage operates in the vacuum of space, performing the “final push” to accelerate the payload to orbital velocity – a blistering 17,500 miles per hour – and precisely deliver it to its final destination, whether that’s a low-Earth orbit, a high geostationary orbit, or an interplanetary trajectory.
This two-stage design allows New Glenn to lift truly massive payloads. It is rated to carry 45,000 kilograms (45 metric tons or 99,000 pounds) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), the region where satellites and space stations orbit. For more demanding missions, it can send 13,600 kilograms (13.6 metric tons or 30,000 pounds) to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), a high-energy “on-ramp” orbit used by large communications satellites.
To provide a clear, at-a-glance summary of the rocket’s core specifications, the following table centralizes the vehicle’s key attributes.
The first stage is the heart of New Glenn and its reusability model. It is a 17-story-tall booster powered by seven BE-4 engines. This is the single most expensive component of the rocket, and its recovery and reuse are the keys to the entire business plan.
Blue Origin has stated that each New Glenn first stage is designed to be flown a minimum of 25 times. This “25-mission” goal is a calculated, pragmatic number. It signals a shift away from demonstration and toward a sustainable, commercial model. By amortizing the high manufacturing cost of a single booster over two dozen flights, the company can drastically lower the per-launch price for its customers.
The company has often described its operational goal as being similar to that of a commercial airliner. The 25-mission life isn’t an arbitrary target; it’s a pre-planned operational lifecycle. This approach is intended to give high-volume, long-term customers, like the U.S. Space Force and Amazon, confidence in a predictable, high-cadence launch manifest. The business will be built on a fleet of proven boosters, not just a single “hero” vehicle.
The flight profile of the first stage is a complex, autonomous ballet. After lifting the second stage out of the thickest part of the atmosphere, the booster separates and performs a “flip” maneuver. It then fires some of its engines to “boost back” toward its landing zone. It re-enters the atmosphere, using a combination of aerodynamic surfaces – strakes and fins near the top – to steer itself. In the final seconds of its descent, it deploys its landing gear, re-ignites its engines for a “landing burn,” and performs a soft, vertical, powered landing on the deck of the moving Jacklyn barge, hundreds of miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
The High-Performance Second Stage
The New Glenn’s second stage, or upper stage, is a high-performance vehicle designed for the demands of deep-space and high-energy orbits. It shares the same 7-meter diameter as the first stage and is powered by two BE-3U engines.
These engines use liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen (LH2) as propellants. This combination is known as a high-energy, high-efficiency “cryogenic” propellant. Liquid hydrogen provides more “bang for the buck” than any other common rocket fuel, giving the stage an extremely high specific impulse, or fuel efficiency. This is what enables New Glenn to send heavy payloads to GTO or even on interplanetary trajectories, as it did with the ESCAPADE Mars mission.
Unlike the first stage, the current New Glenn second stage is expendable. This means that after it completes its mission and deploys its payload, it is “safed” and placed on a reentry trajectory where it will burn up in the atmosphere. This is done to comply with modern orbital debris mitigation standards, ensuring the stage doesn’t become a long-term piece of dangerous space junk.
This expendable design may not be permanent. Blue Origin is known to be working on a concept called “Project Jarvis.” This is a research and development program aimed at making the second stage reusable as well. Reusing a second stage is vastly more difficult than reusing a first stage. It travels much higher and much, much faster, making re-entry and recovery an immense thermal and engineering challenge.
The fact that the company has a named R&D program for this indicates it’s a serious long-term ambition, not just a theoretical one. It positions the current, operational, partially-reusable New Glenn as a foundational stepping stone, not necessarily the final, finished architecture. The ultimate goal, as with all of Blue Origin’s systems, is full reusability.
The Seven-Meter Fairing
It’s easy to overlook the “nose cone” of a rocket, but New Glenn’s payload fairing is one of its most important strategic advantages. The fairing is the clamshell-like structure that protects the satellite (the “payload”) from the aerodynamic forces and extreme heat of launch.
New Glenn’s fairing is a colossal 7 meters (23 feet) in diameter and 22 meters (72 feet) tall. This massive size provides an internal usable volume of over 450 cubic meters. To put that in perspective, this is twice the volume of the 5-meter class fairings used by its primary competitors. The fairing is so large, it could comfortably fit an entire New Shepard rocket inside of it.
During flight, the fairing splits into two “bi-sector” halves and jettisons away after the rocket has cleared the atmosphere, typically a few minutes into the second stage’s burn. This exposes the payload, allowing it to be deployed into space.
This enormous volume is a market-creator, not just a component. For decades, satellite designers have been constrained by a “chicken-and-egg” problem: they have been forced to design their satellites to be intricately folded, like origami, to fit inside the 5-meter-class fairings of existing rockets. This adds immense complexity, cost, and potential points of failure to the satellite. A solar panel that doesn’t unfold or an antenna that doesn’t deploy can doom a billion-dollar mission.
By offering a 7-meter fairing, Blue Origin is telling satellite designers that this constraint is gone. They can now design larger, simpler, and more powerful satellites with simpler, more reliable deployment mechanisms. This new-found freedom fundamentally changes the economics of space hardware.
The fairing’s volume also enables “dual manifesting,” which is the ability to launch two large, full-size spacecraft on a single rocket. For customers, this means they can split the cost of a launch, effectively halving their price for a ride to orbit. For satellite constellation operators like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, this volume is a “killer app,” allowing them to launch more satellites per rocket, building out their network faster and more economically. The 7-meter fairing is, in short, a strategic tool designed to capture and enable an entirely new class of space-based assets.
The Power Plant: A Tale of Two Engines
A rocket is ultimately defined by its engines. The airframe is just a set of tanks; the engines are the complex, beating heart that gives the vehicle life. New Glenn’s propulsion system is a story of two different engines, built with two different philosophies, for two different jobs: the BE-4 and the BE-3U.
BE-4: The Methane-Fueled Heart
The New Glenn first stage is powered by a cluster of seven BE-4 engines. Each of these engines produces 550,000 pounds of thrust, combining for a total liftoff thrust of over 3.8 million pounds. The BE-4 is the most powerful liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) rocket engine ever flown.
The choice of LNG as a fuel was a deliberate and far-reaching decision. LNG, which is primarily liquid methane, has several distinct advantages over traditional kerosene (RP-1) rocket fuel.
The first and most important advantage is reusability. Kerosene is a “dirty” fuel. When it burns, it leaves behind a sooty, oily residue, a process called “coking.” This gunk builds up inside the engine’s complex plumbing and turbopumps, requiring a long, difficult, and expensive refurbishment process to clean out between flights. Methane, by contrast, burns incredibly “clean.” It’s a simple gas that turns into carbon dioxide and water vapor, leaving almost no residue behind. This “clean burn” characteristic is the key to achieving the 25-flight reusability goal. A methane engine is far simpler to inspect, refurbish, and prepare for its next flight.
The second advantage is performance and cost. Methane is a high-performing fuel, and as LNG, it is low-cost, widely available, and easier to handle than some other propellants.
The third, and perhaps most elegant, advantage is a design feature called “autogenous repressurization.” All liquid-fueled rockets face a common problem: as fuel drains from the tanks, something must be piped in to fill the empty space and keep the tank pressurized, pushing propellant into the engines. Most rockets solve this by carrying a separate, heavy, and complex system of high-pressure helium tanks.
The BE-4’s methane fuel allows for a much simpler solution. The system taps off a tiny amount of the liquid methane from the engine, runs it through a heat exchanger to turn it into a gas, and then pipes that hot gas back into the fuel tank to provide the needed pressure. This “self-pressurizing” system completely eliminates the entire helium pressurization system from the rocket. This makes the vehicle lighter, simpler, more reliable, and cheaper to operate, as it doesn’t depend on Earth’s finite and increasingly expensive helium reserves.
The BE-4 engine itself uses an “oxygen-rich staged combustion” cycle. This is a highly efficient but notoriously difficult-to-build engine design. In this cycle, all the propellant is run through the engine’s turbopumps at extremely high pressures, generating massive power from a small package. For years, this technology was mastered only by Russian engineers. The BE-4 is the first American-made, oxygen-rich staged combustion engine to fly.
The Long Road to Flight: BE-4’s Development
The BE-4’s success was not a given. Its development was a long, arduous, and expensive journey that lasted for more than a decade and became a high-stakes bottleneck for the entire U.S. launch industry.
Blue Origin began development of the BE-4 in 2011. The engine was publicly announced in 2014, not just as the engine for New Glenn, but as a product for sale to other companies. Its first and most important customer was United Launch Alliance (ULA), a direct competitor to Blue Origin in the heavy-lift market. ULA selected the BE-4 to power its next-generation Vulcan rocket, which was being designed to replace its long-running Atlas V rocket and, specifically, its Russian-made RD-180 engines.
This engine-sharing deal was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it was a massive victory for Blue Origin. It validated the BE-4’s design, provided a stream of development funding, and secured a major customer before the engine had even flown. On the other hand, it put the company under immense, high-stakes pressure. The BE-4’s development schedule was now tied to two massive rocket programs and U.S. national security, which had mandated a move away from Russian engines.
The program soon ran into significant delays. Building a high-performance, oxygen-rich staged combustion engine from scratch is one of the most difficult feats in aerospace engineering. The BE-4’s complex, 75,000-horsepower turbopumps – the spinning heart of the engine – proved especially difficult to perfect, with “ongoing issues” that pushed the timeline back by years.
The development was punctuated by high-profile failures. In June 2023, a BE-4 engine exploded just 10 seconds into a test-firing on the ground, destroying the engine and damaging the test stand. This incident further delayed the engine’s qualification for flight.
The BE-4’s first-ever flight was not on New Glenn. It was on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, which successfully launched on January 8, 2024, nearly a year before New Glenn’s own debut. The success of that flight was a victory for both ULA and Blue Origin, proving the BE-4 was finally a flight-worthy engine. Blue Origin now runs two separate BE-4 production lines: one to fulfill its contract with ULA, and one to build the engines for its own fleet of New Glenn rockets. This success, born from a decade of technical hurdles, created one of the strangest and most tense dynamics in the modern space industry.
BE-3U: The Hydrogen Upper Stage Engine
In sharp contrast to the BE-4’s difficult, ground-up development, New Glenn’s upper stage engine, the BE-3U, is a perfect example of the company’s “step-by-step” philosophy.
The New Glenn second stage is powered by two BE-3U engines. The “U” in the name stands for “upper stage,” as it is an engine optimized to operate in the vacuum of space. Like the second stage itself, the BE-3U is a high-performance engine that burns liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. It uses a different, more established engine cycle called the “expander cycle,” which is known for its high efficiency and reliability in a vacuum.
But the BE-3U was not a brand-new, unproven design. It was built on the extensive “flight heritage” of its sibling, the BE-3PM (Propulsion Module). The BE-3PM is the exact engine that has powered the suborbital New Shepard rocket for its entire operational life.
New Shepard is not just a space tourism ride; it’s a high-frequency flight testbed. That single BE-3PM engine has flown successfully on dozens of missions. It performs the initial launch, throttles down during flight, and then re-ignites for a deep-throttling, propulsive landing, a feat that requires extreme precision and control.
Blue Origin used the New Shepard program to perfect its hydrogen engine technology in real-world flight conditions, over and over again. When it came time to design the New Glenn upper stage, its engineers didn’t have to start from scratch. They took the flight-proven, reliable design of the BE-3PM and created a vacuum-optimized variant: the BE-3U. This approach of using one program to de-risk the next is a classic example of Gradatim Ferociter in action, saving the company years of development time and cost on its upper stage propulsion.
Rebuilding a Gateway to Space
A rocket as large as New Glenn can’t just be built and launched from anywhere. It requires an equally massive “ground game” – a sprawling, dedicated industrial ecosystem for manufacturing, assembly, and launch. Blue Origin didn’t just build a new rocket; it built an entire end-to-end production and launch system in Florida, an investment that cost well over a billion dollars.
The Rocket Factory at Exploration Park
The journey of every New Glenn rocket begins in a 650,000-square-foot manufacturing complex, often called the “rocket factory.” This facility is strategically located in Exploration Park, Florida, just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Inside this massive building, all the major components of the rocket are fabricated and integrated. It houses a low-bay for building smaller components and a soaring high-bay for the fabrication of the rocket’s massive tanks, the assembly of the first and second stages, and the manufacturing of the giant 7-meter payload fairings. This is a factory in the truest sense, designed to build rockets at a high rate.
The location of this factory is not a coincidence. It is part of a carefully planned, “factory-floor” logistical layout. The rocket factory, the launch pad at Launch Complex 36, and the facilities for booster refurbishment are all located within a nine-mile radius.
This “nine-mile loop” is a physical manifestation of Blue Origin’s “airline-like” logistics model. To achieve a high launch cadence and meet the 25-mission reuse goal, the turnaround time for a booster is a key metric. A recovered booster must be safed at the port, transported back to the factory, inspected, refurbished, and then rolled back to the launch pad for its next mission. By co-locating all these facilities, Blue Origin has created an efficient, repeatable assembly line, minimizing the transportation time, cost, and complexity that would come from a more spread-out operation.
The Rebirth of Launch Complex 36
In 2015, Blue Origin leased Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) from the U.S. Space Force. This wasn’t just any piece of land; it was hallowed ground. From the 1960s to the 2000s, LC-36 was the home of the Atlas-Centaur rocket. From its twin pads, 36A and 36B, NASA launched some of its most iconic robotic missions. The Mariner probes, which were the first to visit Mars and Venus, launched from here. The Pioneer probes, the first to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, also began their journeys from LC-36. The Surveyor missions, which “soft-landed” on the Moon to scout for the Apollo program, also launched from this spot.
But by 2005, the complex was decommissioned. The old towers were dismantled, and the site stood vacant and rusting for a decade, a relic of a bygone era.
Blue Origin invested more than $1 billion to “rebuild the site from the ground up.” The old twin pads were demolished. In their place, the company constructed a single, massive, and thoroughly modern launch pad, optimized for a large, reusable rocket. The site also houses a vehicle integration facility, propellant storage facilities, and a mission control center.
The inaugural launch of New Glenn in January 2025 was the first launch from Launch Complex 36 in 20 years, signaling the rebirth of the historic site and a new era for the Cape.
A key part of this billion-dollar rebuild was the “vehicle integration” facility. This confirms that New Glenn, like many modern rockets, uses a “Horizontal Integration Facility” (HIF) approach. This is a strategic choice. In the old days, rockets like the Saturn V were assembled (“stacked”) vertically on the launch pad itself, a process that took months and left the vehicle exposed to the elements.
In a horizontal integration flow, the rocket and its sensitive, multi-million-dollar payload are assembled horizontally in a clean, weather-protected hangar, much like an assembly line. The completed rocket is then rolled out to the “clean” launch pad on a massive Transporter Erector (TE) and raised vertical only in the final days or hours before launch. This method is far better for a high launch cadence. It protects the vehicle, and more importantly, it keeps the launch pad free. One rocket can be undergoing launch operations at the pad while the next rocket is already being assembled in the hangar, a key requirement for a commercially-focused “launch-a-week” competitor.
Catching a Booster: The Jacklyn Landing Platforms
For a reusable rocket, the launch pad is only half of the equation. A rocket that lands at sea needs a landing platform – a piece of infrastructure as vital and complex as the rocket itself. For New Glenn, the story of its landing platform is a tale of two vessels, both named Jacklyn after Jeff Bezos’ mother. It’s a story that involves a major, costly, and public engineering pivot.
The Scrapped Ferry: An Abandoned Approach
The first vessel to carry the name Jacklyn was acquired in 2018. It was a 180-meter, roll-on/roll-off cargo ferry named the Sea Chieftain. The plan was incredibly ambitious: Blue Origin would convert this massive, ocean-going ship into a moving, dynamically-stabilized landing platform.
The engineering theory was that a ship, unlike a flat barge, could use its own propulsion and a system of “hydrodynamic stabilization” to “steam into” the waves. This would, in theory, create a much more stable landing deck, allowing New Glenn to land in rougher seas that would force a less-capable barge to scrub the mission. It was a technically elegant solution, a perfect “blue-sky” engineering project.
But after four years of complex and expensive conversion work, the plan was unceremoniously abandoned. In early 2022, Blue Origin scrapped the entire project. The partially-converted hull of the first Jacklyn was towed to a scrapyard in Brownsville, Texas, for demolition.
This costly pivot represents a major, and likely painful, strategic shift. It appears to be a classic case of an engineering-led company prioritizing a technically “perfect” solution over a “good enough” one. The “catch-it-while-moving” concept, while elegant, adds immense complexity. It requires the autonomous, descending rocket booster and the autonomous, pitching-and-rolling ship to communicate and perfectly synchronize their positions in a dynamic, high-seas environment. Scrapping the project demonstrates a pragmatic shift in philosophy: abandoning a complex, unproven concept in favor of a simpler, proven one, just to get New Glenn flying.
Landing Platform Vessel 1: A Purpose-Built Solution
The second vessel, which inherited the name Jacklyn, is a much different craft. Officially designated Landing Platform Vessel 1 (LPV1), this new Jacklyn is not a ship. It is a purpose-built, unpowered flat-top barge.
This is a clear and public admission that the “autonomous spaceport drone ship” model – the one pioneered and perfected by its competitor, SpaceX – is the most practical, cost-effective, and operationally-proven solution for at-sea booster recovery. The new Jacklyn is 116 meters (380 feet) long and 46 meters (150 feet) wide, a massive, stable, floating platform with a single job.
It was built in Romania and France and was towed across the Atlantic to Florida, arriving in August 2024. This vessel is the one that was stationed in the Atlantic on November 13, 2025, 375 miles downrange. And this is the platform that successfully caught the “Never Tell Me the Odds” booster, marking Blue Origin’s first-ever booster recovery and its entry into the reusable rocket business.
The Path to Flight: New Glenn’s 2025 Debut
After a development journey that spanned more than a decade, New Glenn’s hardware was finally ready. The rocket factory was in production, the new launch pad was complete, and the landing barge was in position. The year 2025 was set to be the rocket’s debut. The program’s success now rested on two critical, high-stakes test flights.
The following table summarizes the two historic launches that define New Glenn’s flight history to date, showing the clear progression from a partially-successful first flight to a completely-successful second one.
New Glenn’s inaugural flight, NG-1, lifted off from Launch Complex 36 in the pre-dawn hours of January 16, 2025. The rocket’s primary payload was a prototype for Blue Origin’s own “Blue Ring” spacecraft, a type of orbital “space tug.” The mission was a demonstration flight, intended to test the vehicle’s systems and gather data for its certification by the U.S. Space Force.
The launch was a significant partial success. The rocket’s seven BE-4 engines performed well, and the vehicle successfully reached orbit on its very first attempt. The upper stage deployed its Blue Ring Pathfinder payload, achieving the mission’s primary objective. For a maiden flight of a brand-new, heavy-lift rocket, this was a major achievement.
The mission’s secondary objective was not met. The first-stage booster, which the team had nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance” (a reference to a line from the film Dumb and Dumber), was lost during its descent.
This failure was, in many ways, expected. The booster’s nickname alone signaled the company’s self-aware, public acknowledgment of the low odds of success. Landing an orbital-class booster on the first try is an incredibly difficult task. Company officials later stated that they “didn’t expect to ace the landing” and that the real goal of the attempt was to “gather data.”
In this light, the NG-1 landing attempt was a “successful failure.” The booster was not just a piece of hardware to be recovered; it was a high-speed data-gathering mission. The terabytes of real-world flight data collected during its hypersonic re-entry and descent – right up until the moment it was lost – were the true objective. That priceless data, which can’t be perfectly simulated on the ground, was analyzed, and the lessons were used to upgrade the next vehicle. The data from that “failure” is what directly enabled the success of the next flight just ten months later.
NG-2: The ESCAPADE Mission and a Historic First Landing
The second New Glenn flight, NG-2, was a high-profile mission for a high-profile customer: NASA. The launch, set for early November 2025, was immediately plagued by delays. First, a series of bad weather systems moved through Cape Canaveral, with thick cumulus clouds and thunderstorms violating the rocket’s launch criteria. Then, just as the terrestrial weather cleared, space weather interfered. A severe solar storm erupted, sending a torrent of high-energy particles toward Earth. NASA, concerned that this radiation could damage the sensitive electronics of its spacecraft, ordered the launch to stand down.
Finally, on November 13, 2025, all conditions were “go.” The rocket thundered off the pad, carrying three payloads. The primary mission was NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers). This was a pair of twin spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab and led by the University of California, Berkeley, designed to orbit Mars. Their mission is to fly in formation and study how the solar wind (the constant stream of particles from the Sun) interacts with the Martian magnetic field and slowly strips away its atmosphere. A secondary payload, Viasat’s HaloNet, was also on board to demonstrate a new space-based communications technology.
The mission was a complete and resounding success. The New Glenn upper stage performed flawlessly, deploying all payloads into their correct orbits. And, as the world watched, the first-stage booster, “Never Tell Me the Odds” (a Star Wars reference), executed a perfect propulsive landing on the Jacklyn barge.
But the mission’s success also validated a new and ingenious launch paradigm. The ESCAPADE probes did not go straight to Mars. Interplanetary missions are usually chained to restrictive “launch windows” – short periods of time, opening only once every 26 months, when Earth and Mars are in the perfect alignment for a quick, fuel-efficient transfer.
The ESCAPADE mission “pioneered a new trajectory” that shattered this restriction. New Glenn launched the twin probes into a “loiter orbit” at the Earth-sun Lagrange point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable “parking spot” about a million miles from Earth. The probes will stay there for a year. They will wait until the Earth-Mars alignment is ideal in the fall of 2026. Then, they will fire their own small engines, loop back for a “slingshot” gravity-assist maneuver past Earth, and begin their journey to Mars, arriving in 2. This proves that low-cost science missions can launch on their schedule (or the rocket’s schedule), “queue up” in a stable parking orbit, and then leave for their final destination when the time is right. This decouples planetary missions from restrictive launch windows, a massive logistical advantage for the future “road to space.”
The Competitive Landscape
With the complete success of NG-2, New Glenn is no longer a developmental project. It is an operational, proven, heavy-lift rocket. Its arrival dramatically alters the competitive landscape of the global launch market, which, for the last decade, has been largely dominated by a single company, SpaceX. New Glenn enters this arena with a unique set of capabilities, targeting a specific and lucrative segment of the market.
To understand New Glenn’s position, it’s essential to compare it directly to its main rivals. The following table provides an apples-to-apples comparison of the heavy-lift rockets currently operating in the United States.
New Glenn’s most direct and formidable competitor is SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets have set the standard for cost and reliability. A direct comparison of the data reveals New Glenn’s specific market strategy.
It is not designed to be a “Falcon 9 killer.” It is in a different class entirely. New Glenn’s 45-ton LEO capacity is nearly double that of a Falcon 9 (23 tons). This places it in a “sweet spot” between the Falcon 9 and the more powerful Falcon Heavy (64 tons).
The most telling numbers are for high-energy orbits. When both rockets are flying in their cost-saving reusable configurations, New Glenn’s 13.6-ton capacity to GTO is significantly greater than a reusable Falcon Heavy’s, which can lift about 8 tons to the same orbit.
This data shows that New Glenn is not trying to beat Falcon Heavy on raw, expendable power. It is competing on two other, more subtle metrics. First, it is optimized for superior reusable performance to the high-energy orbits that large communications and national security satellites need. Second, it is competing on volume.
New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing, with its 450+ cubic meters of volume, is its defining advantage. It offers more than double the usable space of the 5.2-meter fairings used by both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
The conclusion is clear: New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket purpose-built for a specific and lucrative market. It’s not for small satellites. It is for launching massive, bulky satellites or multiple large satellites at once, and for doing so efficiently to high-energy orbits. Its 7-meter fairing and high-performance hydrogen upper stage are its key selling points, not just raw LEO mass.
A Sibling Rivalry: New Glenn and Vulcan
New Glenn’s other main competitor is ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, and this is where the market dynamic becomes truly strange. Both New Glenn and Vulcan are American-made, heavy-lift rockets. Both are competing for the same multi-billion-dollar National Security Space Launch (NSSL) contracts from the U.S. Space Force. And both rockets are powered by the exact same BE-4 engines on their first stage.
The key difference is that Vulcan uses two BE-4 engines in an expendable, “throw-away” design. New Glenn uses seven BE-4 engines in a reusable design.
This creates an unprecedented “frenemy” relationship. Blue Origin is the sole engine supplier to its primary competitor. ULA’s entire launch manifest, including its critical contracts for the Space Force and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, is completely dependent on Blue Origin’s ability to manufacture and deliver BE-4 engines at a high rate. At the same time, Blue Origin must compete on price and reliability with a rocket (Vulcan) that it enables. This bizarre, symbiotic, and deeply tense relationship gives Blue Origin complex leverage over the entire U.S. national security launch market.
The Future Manifest
With its operational status now proven, New Glenn is no longer a science project; it’s a commercial tool. Its launch manifest for the coming years is already filling up, and these missions reveal the rocket’s true purpose. New Glenn is the single, foundational enabler for Blue Origin’s entire business plan for the next decade.
Securing the National Security Market
New Glenn’s most important and lucrative customer is the U.S. government. The rocket was designed from the beginning to meet the stringent requirements of the U.S. Space Force (USSF) for its National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. This program is how the government launches its most sensitive, high-value military and intelligence satellites.
This “anchor tenant” status is so important that Blue Origin dedicated its first two, high-risk launches to the NSSL certification process. Both NG-1 and NG-2 were formal “certification flights.” USSF officials were on-site at Cape Canaveral to observe the launches, collect data, and validate the rocket’s performance and reliability.
Securing NSSL certification is not optional; it’s the foundation of the New Glenn business plan. It unlocks a steady, multi-billion-dollar stream of government contracts that will underwrite the rocket’s operational fleet for years to come. With a launch for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) already on the manifest for 2026, New Glenn is well on its way to becoming a trusted new provider for America’s most critical space assets.
Enabling Project Kuiper
New Glenn’s largest commercial customer is Amazon. Although it’s a separate company, Amazon, also founded by Jeff Bezos, has booked multiple New Glenn launches to deploy its Project Kuiper satellite-internet constellation. Project Kuiper is Amazon’s answer to SpaceX’s Starlink, a network that will require launching over 3,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit.
This is a perfectly symbiotic relationship. Amazon needs to launch its thousands of satellites as quickly and cheaply as possible. The primary limitation for launching “stackable” satellites like Kuiper’s is fairing volume, not mass. New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing is the “killer app” for this. It’s the largest fairing on the market, allowing Amazon to stack a huge number of its satellites inside a single rocket, like plates in a cupboard.
In return, Project Kuiper provides New Glenn with a massive, guaranteed, and predictable commercial manifest, with the first of these launches scheduled for mid-2026. This allows Blue Origin to ramp up its manufacturing and launch cadence, which in turn lowers costs for all its customers.
The Path to the Moon: Blue Moon and Artemis
The most important long-term job for New Glenn is to be the launch vehicle for Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander. The entire “road to space” vision ultimately leads to the Moon.
Blue Origin is a prime partner in NASA’s Artemis program, holding a major contract to develop a version of its Blue Moon lander that can carry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon. This makes Blue Origin a second, competitive provider for crewed lunar landings, alongside SpaceX.
This entire lunar architecture is designed around New Glenn. The large Blue Moon lander is specifically designed to fit perfectly within the rocket’s 7-meter fairing. New Glenn is not just a rocket that can launch Blue Moon; it’s the only rocket in Blue Origin’s inventory that can.
The success of New Glenn in 2025 was the essential, unblockable first step to validating Blue Origin’s entire lunar contract with NASA. With the rocket now flying, the path to the Moon is open. The manifest for the next two years is focused on that goal.
- 2026: A “Blue Moon Pathfinder” mission is scheduled to launch on New Glenn. This will be an uncrewed cargo-only version of the lander, a demonstration mission to test its systems in deep space and at the Moon.
- 2027: A second pathfinder mission is scheduled. This flight will carry NASA’s VIPER rover, a robotic, golf-cart-sized rover designed to explore the Moon’s south pole and hunt for water ice, a resource that could one day be mined to create drinking water and rocket fuel.
These uncrewed missions are the critical next steps on the company’s “road” to landing astronauts back on the Moon.
Orbital Reef and the Future Space Economy
Looking beyond the Moon, New Glenn is the designated launch vehicle for Blue Origin’s most ambitious concept: Orbital Reef.
Orbital Reef is a commercially-developed space station, a joint project led by Blue Origin and other partners. It is designed to be a “mixed-use business park” in low-Earth orbit, providing a destination for research, manufacturing, and even tourism. It is one of several commercial concepts intended to replace the International Space Station, which is scheduled to be retired around 2030.
This final piece connects the entire corporate strategy. The vision is “millions of people living and working in space.” To do that, you need more than just a transportation network; you need destinations.
Orbital Reef and Blue Moon are the destinations. New Glenn is the “road” that builds and services them. A large space station like Orbital Reef can’t be launched all at once. It must be built in large, prefabricated “modules.” New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing and its 45-ton lift capacity to LEO are precisely what will be needed to launch the large-diameter habitat and laboratory modules that will form the backbone of the Orbital Reef station.
Summary
After more than a decade of quiet, patient, and sometimes-delayed development, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is no longer a theoretical “paper” project. As of late 2025, it is an operationally-proven, heavy-lift launch vehicle.
The complete success of its second flight, NG-2, was a definitive turning point. That single mission successfully deployed a complex interplanetary science mission for NASA and, for the first time, achieved the flawless propulsive landing of its massive first-stage booster. With that landing, New Glenn instantly became the second operational, reusable, orbital-class rocket system in the world.
The rocket is now “open for business,” and its arrival has fundamentally altered the global launch market. With its unique 7-meter-diameter fairing, it offers a new capability – massive payload volume – that is tailor-made for the next generation of large satellites and constellations, most notably Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
New Glenn is the foundational element, the load-bearing pillar upon which Blue Origin’s entire long-term vision rests. It is the vehicle that will compete for lucrative national security contracts, the transport for deploying the Kuiper network, and the only rocket capable of launching the company’s Blue Moon lander. It is, in short, the heavy-freight truck that is finally, and successfully, building the company’s “road to space,” paving the way for its future on the Moon and in Earth orbit.
