Blue Origin successfully launches and recovers a reused New Glenn rocket booster for the first time, marking a key milestone in its rivalry with SpaceX.
WASHINGTON: Blue Origin has successfully launched and recovered a reused booster for its New Glenn rocket for the first time, mastering a complex technical feat that could accelerate its launch schedule and intensify its competition with SpaceX.
The company, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, launched the 98-meter-tall New Glenn from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at about 7:25 am local time carrying a communications satellite for AST SpaceMobile.
This mission marked the third flight of the New Glenn but the first using a previously flown and refurbished booster, which successfully landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean roughly nine and a half minutes after liftoff.
Blue Origin had previously recovered a New Glenn booster in November following an unsuccessful attempt in January 2025 when the booster’s engines failed to reignite during descent.
For this inaugural reuse, the company replaced all of the booster’s engines and implemented several other modifications after its previous flight.
The achievement places Blue Origin’s operational capabilities closer to those of rival SpaceX, which has long pioneered rocket reusability to drive down launch costs.
Blue Origin has previously reused components on its smaller, suborbital New Shepard rocket, but recovering and re-flying the much larger New Glenn booster represents a far more significant technical challenge.
The New Glenn rocket is central to Bezos’s space ambitions and his company’s competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, particularly within NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon.
Both companies are developing lunar landers for NASA as the United States aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2028.
