Bezos’ Blue Origin Lands Reusable New Glenn Rocket After Mars Mission Launch
Blue Origin has successfully landed its New Glenn reusable rocket for the first time, marking a major milestone for Jeff Bezos in his long-running space race with Elon Musk.
The 321-foot New Glenn rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida late Thursday, carrying NASA’s Escapade mission – two probes designed to study how Mars lost its atmosphere, due to arrive at the Red Planet in 2027. After deploying the payload, the rocket’s first-stage booster returned to Earth and landed on an ocean barge, ready to be reused.
The landing makes Blue Origin only the second company, after Musk’s SpaceX, to successfully recover and reuse an orbital-class rocket booster. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets have already flown hundreds of missions using reusable boosters.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, and the company has spent years developing rockets for space tourism and NASA missions. Its smaller New Shepard rocket famously carried Bezos himself on a brief suborbital flight in 2021.
Despite past rivalry and legal battles over lucrative NASA contracts, Musk congratulated Bezos and Blue Origin after the flight, posting on X:
«Congratulations Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin team.»
Kursiv Uzbekistan also reports that Central Asian countries are targeting $20 bn in interregional trade and plan to develop manufacturing under a unified «Made in Central Asia» brand, according to the Ministry of Investments, Industry and Trade.
