Bezos' Blue Origin to revamp New Glenn rocket before next Florida launch

• Blue Origin is upgrading its New Glenn rocket, which launches from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
• The company also announced plans for a larger, more powerful variant of the New Glenn rocket, which would tower over NASA's retired Saturn V.
• The news follows New Glenn's second successful launch earlier in November, which included its first-ever booster landing off the Florida coast.

After two separate liftoffs from Florida, Blue Origin's towering New Glenn rocket is getting a revamp.

Following a successful launch from the Space Coast earlier in November, Jeff Bezos' space technology company announced plans to upgrade the 322-foot rocket ahead of its next spaceflight from Cape Canaveral. The updates would be focused on improving New Glenn's engines to increase its power and adding more reusable components to enable more frequent launches of the spacecraft.

"These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low-Earth orbit, the moon, and beyond," Blue Origin said in a Thursday, Nov. 20, news release.

Blue Origin also announced plans for a bigger, more powerful variant of its New Glenn rocket that would one day launch from Florida's Space Coast, an hour's drive east of Orlando. The spacecraft would add a second launch vehicle for Blue Origin's orbital missions as the company increasingly looks to compete with billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX – whose fleet of Falcon rockets dominates the commercial space industry.

Here's everything to know about Blue Origin's upcoming plans for New Glenn.

Blue Origin announces bigger New Glenn, other upgrades to rocket

Among the upgrades Blue Origin is planning for New Glenn are "higher-performing" engines on both stages of the rocket: the first-stage booster that provides that initial burst of thrust at liftoff, as well as the upper-stage that flies in orbit.

Blue Origin is also integrating more reusable components into the design "to support increased flight rates," the company said.

But perhaps the biggest news Blue Origin shared are its plans for an even larger version of New Glenn – named for NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.

"The next chapter in New Glenn's roadmap is a new super-heavy class rocket," Blue Origin said in a statement.

The new rocket will be called New Glenn 9x4, a reference to its nine engines that will power its first stage and four engines on its second stage. That is an increase of two engines for each stage compared to New Glenn's current design.

How big will next New Glenn be? Taller than NASA's Saturn V rocket

It's unclear just how tall the new vehicle would stand when fully stacked.

However, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp shared a post on social media site X showing digital renderings of the spacecraft dwarfing NASA's retired Saturn V rocket. Standing 363-feet tall, the three-stage heavy-lift launch vehicle was pivotal in the U.S. space agency's historic Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s that launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

For decades, Saturn V was regarded as the largest and most powerful rocket in the world until it was supplanted by SpaceX's Starship. Standing more than 400 feet tall when fully integrated, Starship has been undergoing more than two years of test flights from SpaceX's Starbase town and headquarters in South Texas for future missions to the moon and Mars.

At 322 feet tall, New Glenn's current iteration is comparable in size to NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) developed for the Artemis moon campaign. That size means it already towers over most other rockets that are active today in the United States.

That includes SpaceX's 230-foot Falcon 9, the world's most active rocket responsible for deploying the company's Starlink internet satellites and launching astronauts to orbit on missions to the International Space Station. SpaceX also has a more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket that stands at the same height.

When is the next New Glenn rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida?

Blue Origin, which launches New Glenn from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Brevard County, has not announced a target date for the vehicle's third spaceflight.

The company has also not specified when it expects the larger rocket variant to make its debut, Reuters reported.

But when both rockets are active, Blue Origin envisions that the two New Glenn variants "will serve the market concurrently, giving customers more launch options for their missions, including mega-constellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome."

New Glenn launches for 2nd time on NASA ESCAPADE Mars mission

The New Glenn rocket last got off the ground Nov. 13 from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base – a site Blue Origin invested $1 billion to rebuild.

The launch, a mission Blue Origin referred to as NG-2, also propelled twin NASA ESCAPADE satellites on a journey to Mars. When the spacecraft reach Martian orbit, they are due to spend about a year orbiting the red planet to take simultaneous observations of solar winds and space weather.

The mission comes as NASA prepares to send astronauts back to the surface of the moon – potentially during President Donald Trump's second term – ahead of the first human expeditions to Mars.

The recent mission also saw Blue Origin complete a major first: landing New Glenn's first stage booster on the deck of a drone ship, named Jacklyn in honor of Bezos' late mother, several hundred miles offshore in the Atlantic. The maneuver was one Blue Origin failed to complete in New Glenn's debut voyage Jan. 16, 2025.

Booster returns to Port Canaveral in Florida on drone ship Jacklyn

The booster, nicknamed Never Tell Me the Odds, recently floated into Port Canaveral so that Blue Origin could prepare it for another spaceflight.

Once offloaded, Blue Origin guided the 188-foot-tall booster to the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, making the company the only one besides SpaceX to return a space-flown booster through the gates. The historic moment was one attended by Bezos, the Amazon mogul who founded Blue Origin in 2000.

Contributing: Brooke Edwards, Florida Today; Jennifer Sangalang, USA TODAY Network; Reuters

Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [email protected]