Blue Origin has successfully reused one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time, marking a major milestone for the heavy-launch system as Jeff Bezos’ space company looks to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The company achieved the feat on Sunday with the third ever launch of the New Glenn, and a few more a year later First flight of the new rocket system, which has been in development for more than a decade.
Making New Glenn recyclable is important to the economics of New Glenn. SpaceX’s ability to refly its Falcon 9 rocket boosters is one of the main reasons it has come to dominate the global orbital launch market.
While Blue Origin has already sent commercial payloads into 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 help both it and Amazon build space-based satellite networks.
The booster that Blue Origin flew again on Sunday was The same one that the company used in the second New Glenn mission in November. During that mission, the New Glenn booster helped send 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 boosters on the drone ship for the second time, about 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 into its typical orbit at the time this story was published, and TechCrunch will update the post as the mission progresses.
