How Is Blue Origin’s New Glenn Expected to Evolve and Why?

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The Heavy-Lift Contender

On November 13, 2025, after a series of frustrating delays caused by terrestrial rainstorms and celestial solar flares, the Florida sky over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was finally clear. At Launch Complex 36, a towering white rocket, 98 meters tall, stood ready. This was New Glenn, the orbital heavy-lift vehicle from Blue Origin, and it was poised for its second-ever flight, NG-2.

The first mission, NG-1, in January 2025, had been a partial success. The rocket had reached orbit and deployed its test payload, but the massive first-stage booster, named “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” had failed during its landing attempt and crashed into the Atlantic. For ten months, the company had analyzed the failure, implemented performance upgrades, and prepared its second booster, “Never Tell Me The Odds,” for this flight. The stakes were immense. Another failure would be a devastating setback.

At 3:55 PM EST, the seven BE-4 engines at the rocket’s base erupted in a torrent of intense, blue-white flame, generating over 3.8 million pounds of thrust. The giant rocket, named for the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn, majestically pushed off the pad and thundered skyward.

This flight had two primary objectives. The first was to successfully deploy its payload for its first-ever paying customer, NASA. Tucked inside the rocket’s massive fairing were the twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab. This was NASA’s first mission to Mars in five years, designed to study the planet’s magnetic environment.

Minutes after a successful liftoff, New Glenn’s first stage separated from the upper stage, which continued to carry the ESCAPADE probes toward orbit. The 17-story-tall booster, now on its own, began its autonomous, high-stakes descent. It performed a series of engine burns to slow its blistering re-entry speed, its fins guiding it toward a precise point in the Atlantic Ocean, 375 miles downrange. Waiting there was the autonomous recovery vessel, a massive barge named Jacklyn, after the mother of company founder Jeff Bezos.

Cheers erupted in Blue Origin’s mission control center as live video feeds showed the booster descending perfectly, its single center engine firing in a final braking burn. With pinpoint accuracy, the booster settled onto the deck of the Jacklyn, deploying its six landing legs and securing itself. They had done it. “Never Tell Me The Odds” had, in fact, perfect odds.

Twenty minutes later, the mission’s main objective was also confirmed as a success. The New Glenn upper stage, having performed its own engine burns, successfully deployed the twin ESCAPADE probes, sending them on a long and innovative looping trajectory that would eventually take them to Mars.

The dual success of the NG-2 mission was a watershed moment. After more than a decade of development and an investment of billions of dollars, Blue Origin had not only reached orbit twice, but it had now recovered its reusable booster. On only its second attempt, the company had joined SpaceX as the only other entity to have propulsively landed an orbital-class rocket booster, and one of the largest ever built.

For years, Blue Origin had operated under its motto, Gradatim Ferociter – Latin for “Step by step, boldly.” To many in the industry, the “step by step” part seemed agonizingly slow, while competitors were launching hundreds of rockets. But the NG-2 success was the “boldly” part made manifest. It instantly validated the company’s methodical design and engineering philosophy. It proved that New Glenn was not a “paper rocket” stuck in development; it was an operational, viable, and reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle. With a massive manifest of launches already booked for customers like Amazon, NASA, and the U.S. Space Force, the successful landing of Jacklyn was not an end. It was the beginning of the rocket’s real mission.

Anatomy of a Giant

To understand New Glenn’s potential, one must first appreciate its scale. The rocket is an absolute giant, standing 98 meters (322 feet) tall, just shy of the height of NASA’s legendary Saturn V moon rocket and taller than the Statue of Liberty. Its defining characteristic is its enormous 7-meter (23-foot) diameter, a feature that dictates its entire design and purpose.

It is a two-stage rocket. This means it’s composed of two main sections, or “stages,” stacked on top of each other, each with its own engines and fuel tanks. The first stage provides the initial thrust to get the rocket off the ground and through the thickest part of the atmosphere. The second stage then separates and fires its own engines in the vacuum of space to carry the payload, or satellite, to its final orbit.

The first stage, known as Glenn Stage 1 (GS1), is the reusable booster. It stands 57.5 meters (189 feet) tall and is powered by seven of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines. This is the section designed to fly back to Earth and land on the Jacklyn barge, to be refurbished and flown again.

The second stage, or Glenn Stage 2 (GS2), is currently expendable. It is 23.4 meters (77 feet) tall and is powered by two BE-3U engines. After it delivers its payload to the correct orbit, it is designed to be safely deorbited, burning up in the atmosphere to avoid creating space debris.

In terms of performance, New Glenn is firmly in the “heavy-lift” category. The design specifications call for it to be able to carry:

• 45,000 kilograms (99,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit (LEO), the region where satellites and space stations, like the International Space Station, orbit.
• 13,600 kilograms (30,000 pounds) to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), a high-energy “holding pattern” used by communications satellites on their way to a fixed position 22,000 miles above the equator.
• 7,000 kilograms (15,000 pounds) on a trans-lunar injection (TLI) trajectory, meaning it can send a 7-ton payload on a direct path to the Moon.

These numbers place it among the most powerful rockets in operation, comparable to competitors like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. But as we’ll see, its true competitive advantage isn’t just in the mass it can lift, but in the volume it can carry.

The heart of New Glenn’s first stage and the foundation of its reusability is its engine: the BE-4. This is not just any rocket engine; it’s a revolutionary piece of technology. The GS1 booster is powered by seven of them, and together they create the 3.8 million pounds of thrust needed to lift the massive rocket off the pad.

What makes the BE-4 special is its fuel. It is the most powerful rocket engine ever flown that is fueled by Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which is primarily methane.

For decades, rocket boosters have typically used one of two fuels: RP-1 (a highly refined kerosene, like jet fuel) or liquid hydrogen. The BE-4 represents a new path, and Blue Origin chose methane for several very specific reasons.

The first and most important reason is reusability. Kerosene is a “dirty” fuel. When it burns, it leaves behind a sooty residue, a process called “coking.” This soot, like the carbon buildup in a car’s engine, clogs the incredibly complex and delicate machinery of a rocket engine, such as its turbopumps, injectors, and cooling channels. Refurbishing a kerosene-burning engine for another flight is an intensive, expensive, and time-consuming process of deep cleaning.

Methane, by contrast, burns incredibly cleanly. Its combustion products are just carbon dioxide and water vapor. It produces no soot. This means that after a flight, a BE-4 engine is theoretically ready for inspection and re-flight with minimal refurbishment. For a rocket designed to be reused 25 times or more, this “clean burn” characteristic isn’t just a minor benefit; it’s the core enabler of the entire economic model.

The second reason is performance and cost. LNG is efficient, low-cost, and widely available as a commodity. It is also less difficult to handle than super-chilled liquid hydrogen, though it still requires cryogenic (extremely cold) storage.

The third reason is a piece of elegant engineering: autogenous pressurization. As a rocket flies, the fuel in its tanks is used up. To prevent the tanks from collapsing and to keep fuel flowing to the engines, the empty space must be filled with a pressurized gas. Most rockets, including the Falcon 9, solve this by carrying large, heavy, and expensive tanks of high-pressure helium.

The BE-4 doesn’t need helium. It uses its own fuel. It’s designed to “tap” a small amount of the liquid methane, run it through a heat-exchanger to turn it into a gas, and then feed that gas back into the fuel tank to keep the pressure up. This self-pressurizing system is lighter, less complex, and less expensive, as it eliminates the need for a whole separate gas system and a reliance on Earth’s finite and costly helium reserves.

The BE-4 is also the first oxygen-rich staged combustion engine developed and manufactured in the United States. This is a highly efficient but notoriously difficult engine cycle to perfect, one that Russian engineers had mastered for decades. The success of the BE-4 isn’t just a win for Blue Origin; it’s a major step for American propulsion technology.

Perhaps the most brilliant part of the BE-4’s development is its business model. The BE-4 is not exclusive to New Glenn. Blue Origin sold the engine to its direct competitor, United Launch Alliance (ULA), to power the first stage of their new rocket, the Vulcan Centaur.

This “co-opetition” was a masterstroke.

First, it provided Blue Origin with a steady revenue stream from ULA to help fund the engine’s development.

Second, it allowed ULA to replace its previous rockets, which relied on Russian-made RD-180 engines, thereby ending America’s reliance on a foreign supply chain for national security launches. This made the BE-4 a key piece of U.S. space infrastructure.

Third, and most importantly, ULA’s Vulcan rocket began flying in early 2024, nearly a year before New Glenn’s debut. This meant that Blue Origin received priceless, real-world flight data on its own engines – flown at its competitor’s expense – before it ever had to risk its own rocket. The BE-4 had already been “flight-proven” on Vulcan, significantly de-risking the first flight of New Glenn in January 2025.

The Hydrogen-Powered Second Stage: The BE-3U Engine

If the first stage is all about raw power and reusability, the second stage is all about efficiency and precision. Once the GS1 booster has done its job and separated, the GS2 upper stage takes over in the vacuum of space. This stage uses a completely different propulsion system: two BE-3U engines.

These engines use a different fuel combination: liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen (LOX/LH2).

The “why” for this choice is performance. When it comes to rocket fuel, there’s a key metric called “specific impulse,” which is a measure of engine efficiency. It’s the rocket-engine equivalent of a car’s “miles per gallon” (MPG).

Methane, the fuel for the first stage, offers a good balance of power and efficiency. But hydrogen is in a class by itself. It’s the lightest element in the universe, and when combusted with liquid oxygen, it creates one of the highest specific impulses of any chemical propellant. It is the ultimate “high-MPG” fuel.

This high efficiency makes it the perfect choice for an upper stage. It means the stage can be lighter and still provide the massive change in velocity needed to push a heavy payload from a parking orbit to a high-energy destination, like the GTO orbit required for communications satellites or the interplanetary trajectory needed to send the ESCAPADE probes to Mars.

Like the BE-4, the BE-3U engine didn’t appear out of nowhere. It is a direct evolution of the BE-3PM engine. That is the engine that has successfully and reliably powered Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket on more than 30 flights, including those carrying human tourists to the edge of space. This is another core part of the company’s “step by step” philosophy: perfect an engine on a smaller, operational vehicle, then adapt its technology for the larger, more complex orbital rocket.

The BE-3U is an “expander cycle” engine, a design known for its reliability and elegance. During its development, Blue Origin’s engineers steadily uprated its performance, pushing its vacuum thrust from an initial 160,000 pounds of force to the 175,000 pounds of force it flies with today.

A key feature of the BE-3U engines is their ability to be shut down and restarted multiple times in space. This capability was successfully demonstrated on the NG-1 mission, which featured two burns of the upper stage. This is not a minor detail. A single-burn upper stage is like a cannon – it fires its payload in one shot on a fixed path. A restartable upper stage, by contrast, is like a space tug or delivery van.

It allows New Glenn to conduct complex missions, such as deploying multiple satellites into different orbits on the same flight. The rocket can fire its engines to drop off a first batch of satellites, coast for half an orbit, and then re-ignite to place a second payload in a completely different altitude or inclination. This flexibility is a major selling point for commercial and government customers who want to “rideshare” on a single launch.

The Reusability Equation

The entire design and economic philosophy of New Glenn is built around one, single, driving principle: reusability. The first-stage booster, the most expensive part of the rocket, is designed to be flown, recovered, refurbished, and re-flown a minimum of 25 times.

This is the “commercial airliner” model. No airline would be profitable if it built a brand-new 787 for a flight from New York to London and then, upon arrival, rolled it into the ocean. Yet, for the first 60 years of the space age, that is exactly how the rocket industry operated. The most expensive and sophisticated hardware was built at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, flown once, and then destroyed.

New Glenn’s architecture, like that of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, is designed to break this paradigm. The goal is to make the booster (the “airliner”) a reusable asset and to make fuel, oxygen, and refurbishment the primary costs of each launch (the “jet fuel” and “gate fees”). This is intended to drastically lower the cost of access to space, reduce manufacturing waste, and enable a much higher launch frequency.

The landing process that “Never Tell Me The Odds” executed so perfectly is a masterpiece of autonomous control. After separating from the second stage at the edge of space, the booster is moving at many times the speed of sound. It must first re-orient itself, using thrusters, to point its engines forward.

It then performs a “re-entry burn,” firing several of its BE-4 engines to slow itself down just enough to survive the fiery passage back through the upper atmosphere. As it descends, it uses a set of four fins and “strakes” near the top of the booster to “fly,” steering itself with aerodynamic precision toward its landing target.

Finally, as it approaches the Jacklyn barge, it performs its “landing burn,” re-igniting its center engine (or engines) to decelerate from supersonic speeds, deploy its six hydraulic landing legs, and settle gently onto the deck at a speed of just a few miles per hour. The entire sequence, from stage separation to landing, takes about 10 minutes.

This 25-mission reusability goal is the “why” behind many of New Glenn’s most significant design decisions and, indeed, its long development timeline. A rocket built to be thrown away after one use can be built to be as light as possible, with very little margin. A rocket built to survive 25 flights – 25 launches, 25 high-speed re-entries through the atmosphere, 25 propulsive landings – must be an absolute “tank.”

It has to be over-engineered, structurally robust, and highly durable to withstand the cumulative stress. This added mass and structural margin makes the rocket more complex and more challenging to design. This is also the primary reason for choosing methane (BE-4) as a fuel. The clean-burning nature of methane is what makes the refurbishment part of the 25-flight goal economically feasible.

Blue Origin’s critics often pointed to its slow development as a sign of trouble. But the company was making a deliberate trade-off. It was trading “speed to first launch” for “longevity in service.” The November 2025 landing was the first major validation of that long-term bet.

The Seven-Meter Fairing: A Market Differentiator

While the reusable methane engines get most of the attention, New Glenn’s most potent competitive weapon might be its “nose cone,” or payload fairing. This is the clam-shell-like covering at the very top of the rocket that protects the customer’s satellite from the intense heat and aerodynamic forces of launch.

New Glenn’s fairing is 7 meters (23 feet) wide.

This dimension is hard to overstate. Most of its competitors, including the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Vulcan Centaur, use 5-meter-class fairings (or smaller). Blue Origin’s 7-multimeter fairing provides twice the internal volume of its 5-meter competitors. The company has boasted that its entire New Shepard rocket, which carries six people, could fit inside the New Glenn fairing.

For decades, the launch business has been sold by the kilogram. The main question was, “How much masscan you lift to orbit?” But the satellite industry has undergone a radical transformation, and the main bottleneck is no longer just mass, but volume.

The new dominant business model is the “megaconstellation” – thousands of satellites working in concert to provide global internet, like Amazon’s Project Kuiper and SpaceX’s Starlink. These satellites are not the 10-ton behemoths of the 1990s. They are often flat, lightweight, and mass-produced, packed with antennas and large, unfolding solar arrays.

This creates a “shipping pillows” problem. If you try to ship 5,000 pounds of pillows, your truck’s weight limit isn’t the issue. You’re limited by the space inside the truck. You will “volume out” long before you “mass out.”

This is exactly what happens with megaconstellations. A 5-meter fairing on a powerful rocket might be physically full of bulky satellites even if it’s only carrying half of its maximum mass capacity.

New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing is the “semi-trailer truck” of the launch industry. Its cavernous volume allows customers to package their payloads in new ways, and most importantly, to stack more of these bulky satellites into a single launch. If New Glenn can launch 60 Kuiper satellites at once, while a 5-meter competitor can only fit 30, it has effectively halved the launch cost per satellite for its customer.

This isn’t an accident. This 7-meter fairing was designed specifically for this market. It’s the “what” that explains the “why” of Blue Origin’s most important customer. This massive volume is also a huge selling point for the U.S. Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office, whose next-generation national security satellites are growing in size and complexity and are no longer constrained by the 5-meter fairings of the past.

The Competitive Landscape

New Glenn enters a crowded and dynamic launch market, but its unique combination of reusability, payload volume, and fuel choice carves out a very specific and powerful niche. It is a “one-size-fits-all” rocket, designed with a single configuration to simplify manufacturing and serve the broadest possible range of customers, with a projected cost per launch between $68 million and $110 million.

Here is how it stacks up against its main competitors:

Versus SpaceX Falcon Heavy

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is currently the most powerful operational rocket, boasting a maximum payload capacity of 63.8 metric tons to LEO. However, that impressive number is for a fully expendable flight, where all three of its first-stage cores are discarded. In a reusable configuration, where the two side boosters land on shore and the center core lands at sea, its capacity is lower.

New Glenn’s 45-ton capacity is for a reusable configuration, placing it squarely in the same performance class. The key competition here is in volume and architecture. New Glenn offers far more payload volume with its 7-meter fairing than the Falcon Heavy’s 5-meter fairing. Furthermore, New Glenn is a simpler, single-core rocket, which Blue Origin argues will lead to easier refurbishment and a faster launch cadence than the Falcon Heavy’s more complex three-core design.

Versus ULA Vulcan Centaur

This is a fascinating case of “co-opetition.” Both rockets are powered by Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines. But they are aimed at slightly different markets. The Vulcan, with its ~$100 million price tag, is positioned as a high-reliability, premium vehicle for high-value government and national security missions where precision and schedule assurance are paramount.

New Glenn has a significantly higher payload capacity (45 tons vs. Vulcan’s ~27 tons) and, again, that all-important larger fairing. The rockets are likely to be complementary. ULA will continue to serve the high-energy, high-reliability market, while New Glenn will become the workhorse for the high-volume, high-cadence LEO constellation market.

Versus Ariane 6

This is a battle of philosophies. Europe’s new Ariane 6 is a modern, capable, and expendable rocket. Its key feature is a restartable upper stage, the Vinci, which gives it great flexibility for deploying multiple payloads.

However, it is not reusable. In the new space economy, a fully expendable rocket is at a severe long-term cost disadvantage. New Glenn’s reusability is its overwhelming advantage here. While Ariane 6 will be subsidized and protected for European government launches, it will struggle to compete with New Glenn on price in the open commercial market.

Versus SpaceX Starship

This is not a direct comparison; it’s a difference in vision. New Glenn is an evolutionary rocket. It is a partially reusable heavy-lifter designed to be profitable by serving the existing multi-billion dollar satellite launch market (constellations, national security, science) better, cheaper, and with more volume.

SpaceX’s Starship is a revolutionary vehicle. It is a 150-ton-plus, fully reusable super-heavy launch system. It is so large and so ambitious that its primary customer, Mars colonization, doesn’t even exist yet. Starship isn’t designed to compete for the current market; it’s designed to obliterate it and create an entirely new one.

New Glenn is a rocket for the 2020s and 2030s, built to be a profitable and dominant “truck” for the growing space economy. Starship is a bet on a 2040s-or-beyond vision. For now, New Glenn’s direct competitors remain the Falcon Heavy and the Vulcan Centaur.

The Anchor Tenant: Project Kuiper

Building a rocket as large and complex as New Glenn costs billions of dollars and is an enormous financial risk. To be successful, such a program needs a “launch-on-day-one” customer. New Glenn has the most formidable anchor tenant imaginable: Amazon.

In 2022, Amazon announced the largest commercial launch procurement in history, booking up to 83 launches, worth billions of dollars, for its Project Kuiper megaconstellation. The contract was split between three new, unproven rockets: ULA’s Vulcan, Arianespace’s Ariane 6, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

This move was a massive, industry-shaping bet. Project Kuiper is Amazon’s 3,236-satellite constellation designed to provide global broadband internet, and it is a direct competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink.

The relationship between New Glenn and Project Kuiper is a perfect strategic symbiosis, a fact not lost on the industry, given that Jeff Bezos founded both companies. Project Kuiper is under a hard regulatory deadline from the FCC to deploy half of its constellation – over 1,600 satellites – by July 2026. This creates a massive, well-funded, and urgent demand for heavy-lift launch capacity.

New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing isn’t just a nice-to-have for Kuiper; it was almost certainly designed for it. The rocket is the perfect “truck” to launch the bulky Kuiper satellites in large batches, and the Kuiper contract provides New Glenn with a guaranteed, multi-year, high-cadence manifest.

This “anchor tenant” revenue is what pays for the rocket’s production ramp-up. It ensures the economic viability of the New Glenn program, independent of whether it wins other commercial contracts in the near term. It’s a massive competitive advantage that no other new rocket enjoys.

While Kuiper is the anchor, New Glenn’s order book is deep. It has also secured contracts from major satellite operators like Eutelsat, Telesat, and AST SpaceMobile, and it has been selected by both NASA and the U.S. Space Force for their launch service catalogs, pending final certification.

A Tale of Two Launches: The Path to Flight

New Glenn’s operational status was cemented by its first two flights in 2025.

NG-1 (January 16, 2025)

The inaugural flight was a high-stakes test. Its primary objective was to be a certification flight and to prove the rocket’s core systems. The payload was a technology demonstrator for “Blue Ring,” an in-space platform.

The launch was a partial success. New Glenn’s first and second stages performed beautifully. The rocket achieved a perfect orbit, the second stage’s twin BE-3U engines successfully performed two burns, and the Blue Ring pathfinder payload was deployed and began transmitting data. It proved the rocket could fly and the upper stage could do its job.

The failure came during the landing. The booster, “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” was lost during its descent, crashing into the sea. While a disappointment, this was not unexpected for a first flight.

NG-2 (November 13, 2025)

This was the flight that had to work. After 10 months of analysis and upgrades, the “Never Tell Me The Odds” booster was ready. The primary payload was NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, with a secondary payload for Viasat.

The mission was a total success, from start to finish. The rocket lifted off perfectly. The ESCAPADE probes were deployed on their correct trajectory to Mars. And, most visibly, the booster executed a flawless propulsive landing on the Jacklyn barge.

These two flights were not just test flights; they were formal certification flights for the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. The NSSL program is the “holy grail” of launch contracts, offering lucrative, multi-year deals to launch the nation’s most sensitive and expensive military and intelligence satellites. To be “on-ramped” to compete for these missions, a new rocket must demonstrate a minimum of two successful flights.

The success of NG-2 in November 2025, including the landing, completed this requirement and cleared the final hurdle for New Glenn to be certified. It opened the door for Blue Origin to compete for NSSL’s “Phase 3” contracts, a market worth billions.

The Evolution: What Comes Next

The success of the NG-2 mission was the end of New Glenn’s development. But it was the beginning of its evolution.

The central thesis of Blue Origin is vertical integration. New Glenn’s future evolution is not about building a bigger rocket (like a “New Glenn Heavy”). Instead, the evolution is in the missions and payloads that New Glenn – in its current, single configuration – will launch.

New Glenn is the “truck.” It’s the foundational piece of a much larger, vertically integrated cislunar ecosystem. Blue Origin is now focused on building the services that this truck will deliver. This evolution can be understood in five phases, some of which are already happening.

Evolution Phase I: Blue Ring, The Space Tug

The first payload New Glenn launched, on NG-1, was a pathfinder for Blue Ring. This is a high-tech “space mobility platform,” or, more simply, a “space tug.”

It’s a separate, high-powered spacecraft that will be launched by New Glenn. It’s designed to host, transport, refuel, and maneuver other satellites in space. It uses a sophisticated hybrid propulsion system: highly efficient solar-electric thrusters for slow, long-distance, high-MPG travel, and a traditional chemical thruster for rapid, high-thrust orbital changes.

Blue Ring is designed to carry over 3,000 kilograms of payload and provide services like power, communications, and data processing.

This “tug” brilliantly solves one of New Glenn’s few performance “gaps.” New Glenn’s 45-ton capacity to LEO is massive, but its 7-ton capacity to trans-lunar injection is more modest. So, how does it launch a 20-ton lunar lander?

It doesn’t – not directly. Instead, the strategy is for New Glenn to use its LEO strength, launching the heavy lander plus a Blue Ring tug into a stable low Earth orbit. The Blue Ring, with its cargo attached, would then use its incredibly efficient solar-electric engines to slowly but surely spiral out from Earth, completing the long journey to the Moon over a period of months.

This modular approach is flexible and cost-effective. It lets New Glenn do the “heavy lifting” (the part it’s good at) and lets Blue Ring do the “long-haul” (the part it’s good at). A full-scale Blue Ring mission is already scheduled to fly on New Glenn in 2026.

Evolution Phase II: Blue Moon, The Lunar Gateway

New Glenn is the only rocket capable of launching Blue Origin’s other major program: the Blue Moon lunar lander. This program is the company’s direct contribution to NASA’s Artemis program, which is returning astronauts to the Moon.

The Blue Moon program is split into two landers:

Mark 1 (MK1) Cargo Lander: This is a large, robotic, single-launch lander. It is specifically designed to fit inside New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing. It will be able to deliver up to 3 metric tons (3,000 kg) of cargo – such as rovers, science experiments, or habitat modules – anywhere on the lunar surface. This lander is Blue Origin’s entry for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. A pathfinder mission for the MK1 is slated to launch on New Glenn as early as 2026.

Mark 2 (MK2) Human Lander: This is the flagship. It’s a much larger, reusable, crewed lander being developed with a “National Team” that includes Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. In 2023, NASA selected this vehicle as the second human landing system for the Artemis program. It is currently manifested to carry astronauts to the lunar surface on the Artemis V mission.

This mission architecture is entirely dependent on New Glenn. The MK2 lander is so large that it will require multiple New Glenn launches to fly. The current plan involves one New Glenn launching the lander to lunar orbit, and a second New Glenn launching a fuel tanker. The lander and tanker will dock in lunar orbit, refuel, and then await the arrival of the Artemis V astronauts, who will fly to the Moon on NASA’s Orion capsule.

This makes New Glenn a foundational, indispensable part of America’s plan for a sustained human presence on the Moon.

Evolution Phase III: Orbital Reef, A Station in the Sky

If New Glenn is the truck and Blue Moon is the lunar destination, Orbital Reef is the LEO destination. In partnership with Sierra Space, Blue Origin is developing Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station.

It is being designed as a “mixed-use business park” in space, providing a destination for research, manufacturing, tourism, and government astronauts. It is one of several commercial stations being funded by NASA to replace the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to be retired around 2030.

Orbital Reef cannot be built without New Glenn. The station’s core modules are being designed as large-diameter, single-piece structures. New Glenn’s 7-meter fairing is the only commercial fairing large enough to launch these massive modules. This allows the station to be built with fewer, larger, and more capable components.

Once operational, New Glenn will serve as the primary heavy-lift cargo vehicle to resupply the station with supplies and new hardware. Blue Origin’s strategy is to build not only the rocket to get to LEO, but also the destination to go to.

Evolution Phase IV: The Human-Rated Rocket

The ultimate evolution for any rocket is to carry humans. From its inception, Blue Origin has stated that New Glenn is “engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly humans.” This means the design already includes the structural margins and system redundancy (like the ability to fly even if an engine fails) that NASA requires for “human-rating.”

“Human-rating,” however, is not a feature; it’s a formal, rigorous, and multi-year certification process, primarily from NASA. It requires a company to prove its rocket’s reliability with a long string of successful flights, and it requires a viable “crew survival” or “launch abort” system to pull astronauts to safety in an emergency.

But what capsule would New Glenn launch? Blue Origin has not announced its own orbital crew capsule.

The most logical evolutionary step is to leverage its partners. The Orbital Reef space station team already includes Boeing (the maker of the Starliner crew capsule) and Sierra Space (the maker of the Dream Chaser spaceplane). Both of these are reusable, crew-capable vehicles.

The fastest and most efficient path for New Glenn to fly astronauts is not to spend a decade developing a new capsule, but to “human-rate” the rocket to launch the capsules of its partners to their joint space station. This leverages the strengths of all three companies and provides a non-SpaceX-based transportation system to and from LEO.

This timeline is not public. It will depend on New Glenn establishing a consistent, reliable flight cadence, using the dozens of Project Kuiper launches over the coming years to build the flight-heritage database that NASA will need to grant its certification.

Evolution Phase V: Project Jarvis and Full Reusability

This is the most speculative, and most ambitious, phase of New Glenn’s evolution. “Project Jarvis” is the internal code name for Blue Origin’s R&D program to develop a reusable second stage for New Glenn. This would make the entire launch system (except the payload fairing) 100% reusable, similar to the architecture of SpaceX’s Starship.

Reusing a second stage is an order of magnitude harder than reusing a first stage. The booster, while fast, never reaches orbital velocity. The second stage does. This means a reusable second stage would have to perform a propulsive braking burn in orbit and survive a much faster, much hotter re-entry from orbital speeds, requiring a heavy heat shield and its own landing engines.

It’s a massive technical challenge, but the bigger question is whether it’s an economic one.

This is the “Jarvis Dilemma.” Blue Origin is reportedly running an internal “horse race” to see if a reusable second stage is even a good idea. Reusability is not the goal; lower cost is the goal. A reusable upper stage would be incredibly complex, heavy, and expensive to develop and refurbish.

Blue Origin’s current expendable hydrogen upper stage (GS2) is, by contrast, relatively simple, lightweight, and low-cost.

Jeff Bezos has been publicly non-committal, stating that “on paper, it just isn’t obvious” that a reusable second stage is more economical than a cheap, mass-produced expendable one.

Project Jarvis is, for now, an R&D program “on the shelf.” Blue Origin will not actively pursue it unless it has to. If the current, partially-reusable New Glenn – with its 25-use booster and cheap expendable upper stage – can successfully compete on price and win contracts against Falcon Heavy and Vulcan, there is no economic reason to pursue Jarvis.

If SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship becomes operational and drops the price of launch by an order of magnitude, it will make the current model obsolete. This is what Jarvis is for. It is Blue Origin’s long-term hedge, a defensive design ready to be activated to compete in a market of fully reusable rockets, should that day come.

Summary

New Glenn, after a long and methodical development, became a proven, operational, heavy-lift rocket in 2025. Its inaugural flight proved it could reach orbit, and its second flight proved its economic and technical core: the propulsive landing and recovery of its massive first-stage booster.

Its unique combination of a 25-use reusable methane booster, a high-performance hydrogen upper stage, and a class-defining 7-meter payload fairing carves out a powerful and unique position in the launch market. It is perfectly positioned to serve the existing, lucrative markets for commercial satellites, national security launches, and, most notably, the megaconstellations defined by its anchor tenant, Amazon’s Project Kuiper.

But the rocket’s true purpose, and its entire evolutionary path, is not simply to launch satellites. New Glenn is the foundational pillar – the “truck” – for Blue Origin’s vast, vertically integrated cislunar ecosystem. It is the enabler for the Blue Ring space tug, the Blue Moon lunar landers, and the Orbital Reef commercial space station.

The company is not just building a rocket to sell launches to others; it is building a rocket to serve itself, becoming its own best customer as it seeks to build a permanent road to space. The successful landing of “Never Tell Me The Odds” in November 2025 was not the end of New Glenn’s journey. It was the successful first “step,” allowing the “boldly” to finally begin.