Blue Origin New Glenn rocket deploys Mars satellites in company's first NASA mission

By Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -The Blue Origin space venture of billionaire Jeff Bezos launched its giant New Glenn rocket from Florida on Thursday on its debut flight for paying customers, carrying two satellites on their way to Mars in the company's first NASA-scale science mission. The powerful two-stage rocket, standing 32 stories tall, blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, marking the first mission of any kind flown by Blue Origin since the inaugural launch of a New Glenn vehicle, NG-1, in January 2025. 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 vapor 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.  New Glenn achieved a key engineering objective when its reusable first-stage booster separated from the rocket's upper stage minutes after launch and flew back to Earth, touching down safely on a barge in the Atlantic. Cheers erupted in Blue Origin's Rocket Park mission control center at Cape Canaveral as video showed landing of the booster, dubbed "Never Tell Me the Odds" in a reference to a line spoken by "Star Wars" hero Han Solo line in the film "The Empire Strikes Back." About 20 minutes later, mission control confirmed that New Glenn's upper stage had achieved its primary mission – deployment of NASA's twin EscaPADE spacecraft into outer space to embark on a 22-month voyage to Mars. BLUE AND GOLD The dual spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, are due to reach Mars in 2027 and enter synchronized elliptical orbits for an 11-month study of the planet's space weather environment.  Instruments aboard the satellites will analyze how solar winds – the fluctuating stream of high-energy charged particles from the sun – interact with the relatively weak Martian magnetic field and how that interaction may contribute to depletion of the thin Martian atmosphere.  EscaPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, was originally slated for launch in October 2024, but was delayed for more than a year by setbacks in development of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. The Blue and Gold satellites were built for NASA by the California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab, with instruments supplied by the University of California, Berkeley. The rocket also carried a secondary payload from the satellite company Viasat that remained attached to the rocket's upper stage for a technical demonstration of an in-space communications relay above Earth.  When the rocket made its debut flight in January, it carried Blue Origin's own payload to space – a prototype for its maneuverable Blue Ring spacecraft that the company is developing for the Pentagon and commercial customers. Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, has until recently been known mainly for a space tourism business that flies wealthy passengers to the edge of space in its suborbital New Shepard rocketship, a single-stage reusable vehicle that also has carried more than 200 research experiments inside its capsule. With Thursday's launch, EscaPADE became the first science payload that Blue Origin has delivered into space for NASA or any customer, a key milestone for the Bezos-owned company in its quest to compete on a more equal footing with Elon Musk's SpaceX, the world's leading rocket launch service. PLAYING CATCHUP WITH SPACEX Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars developing New Glenn, a heavy-lift-class rocket designed to become the company's workhorse vehicle for flying humans and cargo to orbit.  Named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, the spacecraft produces two times more thrust at liftoff than SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and about the same as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy vehicle, while offering more cargo room than any of its rivals. NASA has spent roughly $55 million for the EscaPADE mission – a modest price tag relative to the agency's multibillion-dollar space programs – and has paid Blue Origin $18 million for the New Glenn flight, according to federal procurement data.     Blue Origin also supplies engines for other companies' rockets, including United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur, and has been working on a crewed moon lander for NASA's Artemis lunar exploration program, as well as a space station in collaboration with other entities. Blue Origin has far to go to catch up with SpaceX, which has launched its Falcon rockets on nearly 280 missions during the past two years, most of them serving its own Starlink satellite business.  Musk's company also is developing its next-generation Starship rocket, a stainless steel behemoth designed to be fully reusable and serve an array of missions, including flights to the moon and Mars, and expanding SpaceX's Starlink satellite network. Starship, once placed into service, would become the world's most powerful rocket. (Reporting by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

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