New Glenn Returns to Origin

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — At 3:55 p.m. EST on Thursday, November 13th, 2025, Blue Origin’s heavy-lift rocket New Glenn blasted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying NASA’s dual spacecraft mission ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers). Supercluster's Jenny Hautmann was on-site with Blue Origin's team to track the mission and capture photos of the historic launch.

The massive rocket not only successfully lofted its interplanetary payload, but came come to fly another day, a pivotal milestone for the company and the commercial space industry. The ESCAPADE launch was only the second operational flight of the massive New Glenn and also the first time NASA entrusted the vehicle with a primary science-mission payload. These missions are very expensive.

The ESCAPADE mission, built by Rocket Lab for NASA and partners, is two nearly identical satellites tasked with studying how the solar wind and plasma streams interact with Mars’ magnetic environment and strip away its atmosphere over time. The twin spacecraft will spend about a year in a “kidney-bean” shaped loiter orbit near Earth before using a gravity assist around late 2026 and targeting arrival at Mars in 2027.

Back at sea, the New Glenn's first stage achieved a stunning return: approximately three minutes after liftoff and separation the booster relit three of its seven BE-4 engines for deceleration and touched down vertically on Blue Origin’s offshore landing barge named Jacklyn about 375 miles down-range in the Atlantic Ocean. After successful recovery, the booster and the Jacklyn were towed back to Port Canaveral, where Blue Origin rolled the hardware into a hangar at the Cape for inspection and refurbishment ahead of reuse. Jenny Hautmann was at the Port when the massive rocket arrived.

New Glenn was greeted by its boss Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez in a celebratory ceremony and photo op. With the booster safely back and the ESCAPADE probes on their way, Blue Origin is stepping up to compete with SpaceX on reusability, with their orbital recovery breakthroughs a decade apart.

That's Jeffrey Bezos at the bottom right of the photo above, founder of Blue Origin.