Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket on its first-ever interplanetary mission on Thursday, sending twin NASA spacecraft on their way to Mars.
Minutes after deployment, the spaceflight company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos successfully landed the New Glenn’s first-stage booster on only its second try.
The landing, which is similar to how SpaceX brings home the first stage of its workhorse Falcon 9 booster, will enable to Blue Origin to use the main part of the New Glenn for multiple flights, drastically reducing launch costs.
NASA’s ESCAPADE mission got underway from Cape Canaveral in Florida just before 4 p.m. ET on Thursday.
A livestream of the much-anticipated event showed the rocket climbing high into the sky on only its second launch following its inaugural flight in January.
Minutes later, multiple cameras showed the booster returning to a droneship waiting off the coast of Florida. The footage, embedded at the top of this page, occasionally buffered, but cameras managed to catch most of the action.
Bezos also shared an additional clip showing the booster coming in at quite a sharp angle, revealing that it still had a lot of work to do to line itself up with the floating platform.
Blue Origin will be delighted to have its first interplanetary mission in the bag, as well as its first booster landing, as it shows the New Glenn has well and truly arrived on the spaceflight scene.
NASA will be pleased, too, that it has yet another private option for missions to space.
The space agency’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission is using two identical spacecraft to explore how the solar wind interact with Mars’ magnetic environment, and how this interaction causes the red planet’s atmosphere to leak into space.
Scientists hope that the mission’s findings will shed more light on Mars’ past and present ability to support life, and provide valuable insights for future crewed missions to the red planet, including data on radiation exposure and other possible challenges.
