New Glenn’s Breakthrough: Blue Origin Emerges as a Serious SpaceX Rival

After several postponements, Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket cleared the Florida sky on its second launch attempt, successfully sending a pair of ESCAPADE probes toward Mars and landing its first stage on a drone ship. The mission marks a major milestone for Blue Origin and the commercial space sector: a large orbital vehicle demonstrating both payload delivery and booster recovery.

ESCAPADE and the Mars mission

The two ESCAPADE spacecraft—built for NASA by Rocket Lab—are bound for Mars to study how the solar wind interacts with the planet’s magnetic environment and drives long-term atmospheric escape. NASA said the probes will “investigate how the solar wind interacts with Mars’s magnetic environment and how this interaction drives the planet’s atmospheric escape.”

Scientists believe Mars once had a denser atmosphere and a warmer, wetter climate. Without a sustained, global magnetic field like Earth’s, the planet gradually lost much of its atmosphere to charged particles from the Sun. ESCAPADE will help quantify those processes and improve understanding of planetary habitability.

What Blue Origin still needs to prove

Despite wide praise for the flight—and even a cordial acknowledgement from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—Blue Origin faces two critical hurdles before it can be considered a direct, sustained competitor to SpaceX.

1) Reuse at scale: Economical launch depends on reliably recovering and flying the same first-stage boosters multiple times. SpaceX has demonstrated that repeated reuse dramatically lowers costs; Blue Origin must show consistent multi-flight reuse of New Glenn boosters.

2) Launch cadence: SpaceX routinely flies multiple Falcon 9 missions a week. To compete for regular commercial and constellation business, New Glenn must achieve a much higher launch tempo.

Blue Origin hopes to secure steady demand by flying large low-Earth-orbit broadband constellations such as Amazon’s Kuiper (now called Amazon Leo) as anchor customers, but it will face strong incumbency from SpaceX’s Starlink. Ars Technica has reported Blue Origin’s internal goal of as many as 24 New Glenn launches in 2026—an ambitious target that will test manufacturing and operations.

Next big test: the Moon

The next major New Glenn mission, currently scheduled no earlier than January 2026, will attempt to deliver the uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the lunar surface. Blue Moon Mark 1 is designed to carry instruments and cargo to the Moon and to validate systems for a later crewed lander.

Blue Origin envisions a Blue Moon Mark 2, a crew-capable lunar lander, to be operational around 2030 and to compete with SpaceX’s Starship-based human landing system for NASA’s Artemis program. Success with the Mark 1 lunar landing would strengthen Blue Origin’s prospects as a contributor to future crewed missions; a failure would boost competitors’ relative standing.

Both U.S. companies are racing to field human landing solutions in the late 2020s amid growing international lunar ambitions and political timelines. Ultimately, sustained booster reuse, increased launch cadence, and reliable lunar operations will determine whether New Glenn becomes a regular alternative to Falcon 9 and Starship-era services.

Author: Mark R. Whittington, frequent commentator on space policy.