Blue Origin launches NASA Mars spacecraft, lands booster during historic New Glenn mission

• The rocket's massive first-stage booster successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
• The ESCAPADE mission will study the Martian atmosphere to better understand the effects of solar eruptions.
• This liftoff marked the 95th orbital launch from Florida's Space Coast in 2025, extending the annual record.

Towering taller than the length of a football field, Blue Origin's outsized New Glenn rocket notched a successful, second-ever launch on Thursday, Nov. 13, deploying NASA's twin ESCAPADE spacecraft into low-Earth orbit.

And in an engineering feat matched only by SpaceX, the massive 188-foot first-stage booster — aptly named Never Tell Me the Odds — landed atop Blue Origin's drone ship Jacklyn 375 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Today @NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars launched aboard @blueorigin’s New Glenn rocket — another milestone for @POTUS’ promise that America will lead the World in space exploration," NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said in a tweet. He shared a video of the 3:55 p.m. liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

"ESCAPADE puts America one step closer to walking on Mars by studying how solar eruptions shape the Martian atmosphere," Duffy said.

Blue Origin's liftoff marked the 95th orbital rocket launch of 2025 from Florida's Space Coast, extending the ongoing annual record. Then the 96th liftoff occurred hours later. United Launch Alliance sent up an Atlas V rocket at 10:04 p.m. from Launch Complex 41, deploying a Viasat communications satellite.

Ground controllers for the ESCAPADE mission established communications with both spacecraft by 10:35 p.m., NASA reported in a press release. They will move to a "loiter orbit" about 1 million miles away, then use Earth’s gravity to slingshot themselves toward Mars in November 2026.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted congratulations to Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin team after the booster landed on Jacklyn, as did other SpaceX executives.

"This milestone moves the country and industry forward to aircraft like operations and cheaper, more available launch!" SpaceX Vice President of Launch Kiko Dontchev said in a tweet.

New Glenn is engineered to hoist up to 45 metric tons into low-Earth orbit inside its 7-meter nose cone fairing — which encapsulates roughly twice the volume of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Asked by FLORIDA TODAY about the emergence of New Glenn and SpaceX's Starship heavy-lift rockets, former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría offered a brief reply: “Can’t come soon enough.”

López-Alegría — who has flown into low-Earth orbit six times — is now chief astronaut at Axiom Space. He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2021, and he is former president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation in Washington, D.C.

During a Nov. 6 roundtable at The Economist's Space Economy Summit at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, López-Alegría likened today's economy in low-Earth orbit and the microgravity environment with the dawn of the internet during the 1990s.

“Nobody knew that you could (someday) take out your phone and buy a pizza, or make a bank transaction. And now, look at the proliferation of things you can do. So with that model in mind, nobody can predict what we’re going to be doing in low-Earth orbit in 25 years," López-Alegría said

"But — shoot — now is the time to get in on the ground floor," he said.

On the military front, an on-site Space Force certification team observed New Glenn's flight amid the process of approving the rocket for national security launches.

“The Space Force congratulates Blue Origin on its launch of NG-2, a monumental step towards New Glenn delivering our most critical warfighting capabilities to orbit,” Lt. Col. Brian Scheller, Space Systems Command's system program manager, said in a press release.

For the latest news from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit floridatoday.com/space. Another easy way: Click here to sign up for our weekly Space newsletter.

Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at[email protected]. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1

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