Blue Origin is one step closer to the second-ever launch of its New Glenn rocket. On Wednesday morning, the teams launched a 189-foot-tall (57.5 m) booster from their rockets at the rocket park near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex to begin their journey to Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The company announced the rocket was moving around 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 UTC) as it launched six space tourists simultaneously on a suborbital New Shepard launch from West Texas.
The booster, named ‘Never Tell Me the Odds’, alludes to the famous line star warswill be used during the upcoming launch of NASA’s Mars-bound Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission. No specific date has been announced for this, but it is likely to happen in early November.
The twin satellites, named ‘Blue’ and ‘Gold’, were flown to Florida from Rocket Lab’s facilities in Long Beach, California in September for final processing before the upcoming launch. The EscaPADE mission was originally planned for New Glenn’s inaugural flight, but this changed when it became clear the rocket was not going to be ready for launch in October 2024.
The EscaPADE mission, also called New Glenn 2 or NG-2, comes about ten months after New Glenn’s inaugural flight in January, which demonstrated the company’s Blue Ring. A future version of that spacecraft will be able to host and deploy multiple payloads and perform orbital maneuvers as needed.
Last week during the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, Australia, Pat Remias, Blue Origin’s vice president of space systems development, said they “fully intend” to recover the booster during the upcoming flight.
Like SpaceX, Blue Origin is also using a designed seaplane as a landing pad for the first stage booster. Blue Origin attempted to land its first booster, ‘So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance’, on a ship named ‘Jacqueline’, but failed.
“The final accident report identified the probable cause of the accident as the inability to restart New Glenn’s first stage engines, preventing the reentry burn from occurring and resulting in the loss of the stage,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in late March, following the conclusion of the Blue Origin-led accident investigation.
“Blue Origin has identified seven corrective actions to prevent a recurrence of the incident. The FAA will verify that Blue Origin implements the corrective actions prior to the launch of the New Glenn-2 mission.”
Blue Origin is very confident in its ability to land this next booster. During the IAC, Remias said that if it is successfully recovered, Blue Origin will fly it on its third mission, the first to carry Blue Moon Mark 1, an unmanned lunar lander.
“We’ll use that first stage on the next New Glenn launch,” Remias said. “That’s the intention. This time we are quite confident.”
For comparison, SpaceX landed its first booster on December 21, 2015, about 5.5 years after its first flight. The first successful landing on one of its drone ships did not occur until April 8, 2016. It would not fly any of its boosters again until March 30, 2017.
Blue Origin is making progress in increasing production for its New Glenn rockets, perhaps most notably with cranking up the second stage. The upper stage for the NG-2 mission was tested on a stand near the launch pad in LC-36 in April and they conducted a similar test for the third upper stage in August.
New Glenn’s upper stage is powered by a pair of BE-3U engines, which are powered by a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. The rocket’s booster uses Blue Origin’s seven BE-4 engines powered by a combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.
