Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on Friday launched the giant New Glenn rocket from Florida. This is the rocket’s debut mission, sending two NASA satellites toward Mars and nailing the return landing of its reusable booster for the first time.
With Thursday’s launch, NASA’s twin EscaPADE spacecraft became the first science payload that Blue Origin has delivered to space for NASA or any customer.
The powerful two-stage rocket’s first flight since its inaugural launch in January and the successful booster landing at sea represented key milestones for Blue Origin in its quest to compete on a more equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the world’s leading rocket-launch service.
A live Blue Origin webcast showed the rocket ascending from its launch tower through clear afternoon skies in a thunder of flames and billowing clouds of vapour moments after its seven BE-4 liquid-fueled engines roared to life.
The launch followed several days of delays due to cloudy skies and a geomagnetic storm.
Some 10 minutes after liftoff, the 17-story-tall New Glenn first-stage booster made a return landing on the deck of a barge, named Jacklyn in honour of Bezos’ mother, floating in the Atlantic, achieving for Blue Origin an important feat in reusability that was pioneered by SpaceX.
About 20 minutes later, mission control confirmed that New Glenn’s upper stage had achieved its primary mission, deployment of the EscaPADE spacecraft into outer space to embark on a 22-month voyage to Mars.
The rocket also carried a secondary payload from the satellite company Viasat that remained attached to its upper stage for a technical demonstration of an in-space relay of telemetry data above Earth. Blue Origin said the test was a success.
When the rocket made its debut flight in January, it carried Blue Origin’s own payload to space, a prototype for its manoeuvrable Blue Ring spacecraft that the company is developing for the Pentagon and commercial customers.