Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced that its heavy-lift launch vehicle "New Glenn" has successfully reused the first-stage rocket booster for the first time, marking a key milestone for this new generation of high-thrust rocket systems. It is also seen as the company is accelerating to catch up and challenge Musk's SpaceX's dominance in the global orbital launch market.
The mission, carried out on Sunday, was New Glenn's third launch just over a year after its first flight, and the rocket system itself has been in development for more than a decade. Blue Origin has used New Glenn to launch a commercial payload before, but this launch is the first time that a previously used booster has been recovered after completing the mission to verify its reusability.
For New Glenn, achieving reusability is considered one of the key factors for the success of its business model. The reason why SpaceX can occupy a dominant position in the global orbital launch market is largely due to the high-frequency reuse of the Falcon 9 (Falcon 9) first-stage booster, which significantly dilutes the cost of a single launch. Blue Origin's replication of similar ideas on New Glenn is regarded by the outside world as a substantial step forward in the heavy-lift rocket commercial competition.
Blue Origin has goals beyond launching satellites for commercial customers. The company hopes to use New Glenn to undertake future NASA moon landing missions and provide orbital capabilities for itself and Amazon's planned space Internet satellite constellation, becoming an important part of its broader space infrastructure layout. Currently, Blue Origin is making final preparations for its first robotic lunar lander, which it plans to attempt to launch later this year.
The booster that was reused this time was the one used by Blue Origin during its second New Glenn mission in November last year. During that mission, the booster helped two NASA robotic probes reach Mars orbit and then successfully landed on an unmanned recovery ship at sea. In the latest mission this Sunday, after the booster completed its orbiting work again, it was smoothly recovered on an unmanned ship at sea about ten minutes after launch, achieving "second flight and second recovery."
The main mission of this launch is to deliver a communications satellite into orbit for customer AST SpaceMobile. At the end of the launch, New Glenn's upper stage was still performing orbital maneuvers to send the satellite to its intended orbit. Further updates on the mission's progress are expected to follow.