Space

Blue Origin Launches Landmark Mission To Mars

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully landed a rocket back on Earth after releasing two satellites into space.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off for its second mission, the NG-2, from Space Launch Complex 36 at the Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on November 13, 2025. New Glenn, the towering rocket built by Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin, is set to take off on its second mission as competition intensifies with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
(Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)

It was a landmark day for Jeff Bezos' company and NASA on Thursday, as Blue Origin successfully launched its massive New Glenn rocket into space with a pair of NASA spacecraft ultimately destined for Mars.

The 321-foot rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station under a beautiful sunny sky. The launch, which was supposed to take place last Sunday, was originally scrubbed due to bad weather as well as the solar storms that pushed auroras as far south as Florida this week.

In addition to sending NASA's twin Mars orbiters on a long journey to the red planet, the rocket was also able to return successfully to Earth. The New Glenn rocket landed upright on an ocean platform roughly 375 miles off the Florida coast.

New Glenn’s inaugural test flight in January delivered a prototype satellite to orbit, but failed to land the booster on its floating platform in the Atlantic.

The two Mars orbiters, named Escapade, will spend a year in the vicinity of Earth — roughly 1 million miles away — before the planetary alignment will be right for them to take the next step toward Mars.

Ultimately, they will arrive at the red planet in 2027 to study space weather. The spacecraft is designed to map the planet's upper atmosphere and scattered magnetic fields, studying how they interact with solar wind. The observations should help to explain how the planet went from wet and warm to its dry and dusty state. Scientists will also learn how best to protect astronauts against the harsh radiation environment on Mars.

“We really, really want to understand the interaction of the solar wind with Mars better than we do now,” Escapade’s lead scientist, Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, said ahead of the launch. “Escapade is going to bring an unprecedented stereo viewpoint because we’re going to have two spacecraft at the same time.”

Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, New Glenn is five times bigger than the New Shepard rockets that have sent wealthy clients to the edge of space from a launch point in West Texas. Blue Origin plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lunar lander on a demo mission in the coming months aboard New Glenn.

Created in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin already holds a NASA contract for the third moon landing by astronauts under the Artemis program. Elon Musk’s SpaceX beat out Blue Origin for the first and second crew landings, using Starships nearly 100 feet taller than Bezos' New Glenn.

But last month NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy reopened the contract for the first crewed moon landing, citing concern over the pace of Starship’s progress in flight tests from Texas. Blue Origin as well as SpaceX have presented accelerated landing plans.

NASA is on track to send astronauts around the moon early next year using its own Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket. The space agency is pressing to get astronauts back on the lunar surface by decade’s end in order to beat China.

Twelve astronauts walked on the moon more than a half-century ago during NASA's Apollo program.