CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — In a triumphant moment for Jeff Bezos' space venture, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket soared into the sky on Thursday, November 13, 2025, marking the company's second successful orbital launch and achieving a historic first: the precise landing of its massive first-stage booster on a floating platform at sea. The 321-foot (98-meter) heavy-lift vehicle lifted off at 3:55 p.m. Eastern Time from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, executing a flawless stage separation about four minutes into flight before the booster executed a controlled descent and touchdown on the barge Jacklyn, positioned roughly 375 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. This feat, dubbed "Never Tell Me the Odds" for the booster in a nod to Star Wars lore, elicited cheers from Blue Origin's mission control team, who chanted "Next stop, moon!" as video feeds confirmed the upright landing.
The mission, designated NG-2, deployed NASA's twin Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) spacecraft into a loiter orbit at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2, approximately 930,000 miles from our planet. These identical probes, nicknamed Blue and Gold, are bound for Mars on a 22-month journey, arriving in September 2027 to study the Red Planet's magnetosphere and how solar wind erodes its thin atmosphere. Built by Rocket Lab for the University of California, Berkeley under NASA's Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program, the $107.4 million ESCAPADE duo will provide the first stereo 3D mapping of Mars' upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetic fields, shedding light on why the once-water-rich world devolved into a desert. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy hailed the launch as a "heliophysics mission [that] will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface."
This breakthrough comes at a pivotal time for Blue Origin, founded in 2000 by the Amazon billionaire with a vision of millions living and working in space. New Glenn represents a quantum leap from the company's suborbital New Shepard vehicle, which has ferried wealthy tourists on 11-minute joyrides to the edge of space since 2021 using a single BE-3 engine. In contrast, New Glenn's first stage boasts seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines, delivering over 17,000 kilonewtons of thrust—enough to loft up to 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit in reusable mode or 13 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. Designed for at least 25 flights per booster with minimal refurbishment, the rocket is reusable like SpaceX's Falcon 9, but on a grander scale, positioning it for satellite constellations, national security payloads, and deep-space probes.
Thursday's success builds on New Glenn's inaugural flight in January 2025, which reached orbit with a prototype satellite but missed the booster recovery after a failed engine relight during descent. That mission, while partial, validated the upper stage's performance and paved the way for commercial contracts. Now, with two consecutive orbital insertions, Blue Origin is demonstrating reliability to clients like Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband network, AST SpaceMobile, and telecommunications giants, alongside a backlog of NASA and U.S. Space Force missions.
Experts view this as a game-changer in the intensifying rivalry with Elon Musk's SpaceX, which commands over 80% of the global launch market through its Falcon family and the developmental Starship. Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told The Washington Post that "the fact that [Blue Origin] has graduated to a paying customer does demonstrate a level of comfort with the New Glenn vehicle, even though it’s just the second launch." Swope added that, following this smooth outing, Blue Origin can now argue its rocket's superior consistency compared to Starship, which has completed 11 test flights as of October 2025—including dummy satellite deployments—but suffered five failures, some involving dramatic explosions during ascent or reentry. Starship's latest, the 11th flight on October 13, achieved a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean after testing heat shield tiles and engine relights, but earlier mishaps—like the ninth flight's composite pressure vessel rupture—have delayed certification for crewed Artemis lunar landings.
The path to Thursday's liftoff was fraught with delays, underscoring the unpredictable nature of spaceflight. An initial attempt on Sunday, November 9, was scrubbed due to lightning-risk cloud cover violating upper-level wind constraints, as forecasted by the 45th Weather Squadron with less than 50% "go" odds. A Wednesday, November 12, retry faced over 95% favorable terrestrial conditions but was halted by "highly elevated solar activity"—a severe geomagnetic storm from coronal mass ejections off sunspot AR4274, which painted auroras across Florida's skies and posed risks to spacecraft electronics and communications. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a rare "severe" alert for proton flux exceeding 10 pfu, prompting NASA to postpone to protect ESCAPADE's sensitive instruments. Ironically, the mission's focus on solar wind interactions made the delay a prudent safeguard.
Beyond the immediate payload success, Thursday's flight included Viasat's HaloNet demonstration, testing telemetry relay services for NASA's Communications Services Project via the rocket's second stage. This marks New Glenn's second National Security Space Launch certification flight, advancing U.S. Space Force validation for classified payloads. NASA awarded Blue Origin $18 million for the ESCAPADE ride, part of a $55 million mission budget—a fraction of flagship programs like Perseverance rover.
Blue Origin's resurgence is timely amid NASA's Artemis push. The company holds a $3.4 billion contract for the Blue Moon lunar lander, targeting uncrewed demos in 2026 and crewed missions by 2029, though SpaceX's Starship won the first two Artemis lander slots. With production ramping—multiple boosters in build and years of orders—New Glenn could capture 20-30% market share by 2030, analysts predict, fostering a healthier U.S. launch ecosystem less reliant on SpaceX.
The recovered booster, now en route to port for inspections, could fly again soon, slashing costs from $100 million per launch toward $20-30 million with reuse. As Bezos tweeted post-landing, "A landed orbital rocket! What an incredible day for Blue Origin." With Starship eyeing Mars in 2026 and New Glenn eyeing the moon, the billionaire space race is accelerating, promising cheaper access to orbit and beyond for science, commerce, and exploration.
