Blue Origin has successfully reused one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time ever, marking a major milestone for the heavy-launch system as Jeff Bezos’ space company looks to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The company accomplished the feat Sunday on just the third-ever launch of New Glenn, and a little more than one year after the first flight of the new rocket system, which has been in development for more than a decade.
Making New Glenn reusable is crucial to the economics of New Glenn. SpaceX’s ability to re-fly Falcon 9 rocket boosters is one of the main reasons why it has come to dominate the global orbital launch market.
While Blue Origin has already sent commercial payloads to space with New Glenn — Sunday was the second-such mission to carry a customer satellite — the company wants to use the rocket for NASA moon missions, and to help both it and Amazon build space-based satellite networks.
The booster that Blue Origin re-flew on Sunday was the same one the company used in the second New Glenn mission in November. During that mission, the New Glenn booster helped put two robotic NASA spacecraft into space for a mission to Mars, before returning to a drone ship in the ocean. On Sunday, Blue Origin recovered the rocket booster a second time on a drone ship roughly 10 minutes after takeoff.
Sunday’s primary mission was to send a communications satellite into space for customer AST SpaceMobile. The New Glenn upper stage was still carrying the satellite to its specific orbit at the time this story is published, and TechCrunch will update the post as the mission progresses.