Blue Origin is preparing to launch its New Glenn rocket for the second time. Here’s everything you need to know about this mission, including where to watch the live broadcast of the flight.
The second reusable rocket in history
The New Glenn rocket is one of Blue Origin’s key projects: it is tasked with competing with SpaceX’s legendary Falcon 9.
New Glenn has a two-stage design. It is 98 meters high and seven meters in diameter. It can carry up to 45 tons of cargo into low Earth orbit and 13 tons into geostationary transfer orbit. The rocket uses methane as fuel and liquid oxygen as an oxidizer.
A key feature of New Glenn is that its first stage is reusable. After separation, it lands on a barge in the ocean. According to the designers, the stage can be reused up to 25 times. In the past, Blue Origin also announced its intention to create a reusable version of the second stage of New Glenn; however, it is currently unknown whether work is underway in this direction.
This is New Glenn’s second flight. The first took place in January 2025. At that time, the rocket successfully delivered its payload into orbit, but Blue Origin specialists were unable to recover its first stage.
New Glenn flight plan
The payload for the upcoming mission consists of three cargo items: a demonstrator from Viasat and a pair of ESCAPADE probes built by Rocket Lab for NASA. The flight plan calls for the New Glenn first stage to perform a return maneuver after separation and then land on the Jacklyn barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
As for the second stage, it will launch the ESCAPADE spacecraft onto a trajectory that will take it into orbit around the L2 Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system. The probes will spend about a year there observing space weather. After that, they will fly past Earth and use its gravity to head towards their main destination – Mars.
If everything goes according to plan, the spacecraft will enter orbit around Mars in September 2027. There, they will study the Red Planet’s magnetosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind and atmosphere. You can find out more about the mission’s objectives and how it will be carried out in our article.
Live broadcast of the New Glenn launch
The first attempt to launch New Glenn took place on November 9. However, it was canceled due to weather conditions. The next attempt is scheduled for November 13. The launch window for New Glenn will open at 9:57 p.m. Kyiv time (7:57 p.m. UTC). Blue Origin has already confirmed that the recently imposed FAA restrictions on rocket launches from US territory do not apply to this mission. The launch window for New Glenn will remain open until 11:25 p.m. Kyiv time (9:25 p.m. UTC).
The launch will be broadcast live on the Blue Origin website and on the company’s YouTube channel. In addition to the official broadcast, various bloggers and space-themed communities will be broadcasting their own coverage of the New Glenn flight.
The success of the upcoming launch is very important for Blue Origin. It will demonstrate its ability to deliver cargo into interplanetary space and enable the rocket to be certified for missions related to US national security. And if Blue Origin succeeds in landing the stage, it will become only the second company in history to achieve this feat.
At present, Blue Origin estimates the chances of a successful landing of the New Glenn first stage at 75%. However, many independent experts believe that this figure is overly optimistic, citing the number of unsuccessful Falcon 9 first-stage landings required by SpaceX before its engineers were able to solve this problem. We will soon find out which of them is closer to the truth.
