Heavy-lift Booster: Blue Origin Achieves Relanding

For the first time, the space company Blue Origin has successfully recovered a used first stage of an orbital rocket. This feat was previously the sole domain of SpaceX. The booster of the heavy-lift rocket New Glenn landed on a platform floating in the Atlantic on Thursday. Thousands of Blue Origin employees who followed the event via live broadcast erupted in loud cheers.

Blue Origin succeeded in this feat on its second attempt. Almost exactly ten years ago, on November 23, 2015, Blue Origin, also on its second try, managed the relanding of the booster of the “New Shepard” rocket. The key difference: New Shepard is not an orbital rocket, unlike New Glenn. This heavy-lift rocket stands nearly 100 meters tall and has a diameter of seven meters. It can carry up to 45 tons into low Earth orbit (LEO) or over 13 tons into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). New Glenn is intended for both uncrewed and crewed missions, including to other celestial bodies.

The recovered first stage, named “Never Tell Me the Odds,” could now be refurbished and reused. Its design is intended for at least 25 launches, significantly reducing the cost of rocket launches. The company hopes to soon become a tougher competitor to SpaceX. New Glenn can transport approximately twice the payload into near-Earth orbits compared to SpaceX's Falcon 9.

Mars Mission Escapade

The primary purpose of Thursday's rocket launch was to send NASA's Escapade mission into space. Escapade stands for “Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers.” With two probes on board, the New Glenn rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:55 PM local time. The two probes are named Blue and Gold. They will first fly to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. At these points, the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth balance each other, allowing objects with low mass, such as satellites, to orbit the Sun stably without propulsion.

Also transported was a novel Viasat satellite, which must prove the suitability of its design for the Communications Services Project from NASA. With this project, the US space agency aims to develop satellite constellations with six commercial providers that can be used for communication with other objects in orbit, especially Earth observation satellites.

Blue and Gold are scheduled to depart again in November; they will ignite their engines and accelerate towards Mars using Earth's gravity. Once there, they are intended to investigate how solar wind interacts with Mars' magnetic environment. This is expected to provide insights into the disappearance of the Martian atmosphere.

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