Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket successfully completed its second orbital mission, deploying NASA’s twin ESCAPADE spacecraft and achieving a precision landing of its fully reusable first-stage booster on the recovery vessel Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.
The heavy-lift rocket thundered off the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36 at 3:55pm (EST) on Thursday, 13 November 2025 (20:55 UTC), powered by seven BE-4 engines.
The mission, nicknamed “Never Tell Me The Odds”, delivered the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) probes into their planned loiter orbit, where they will remain until Earth and Mars reach the optimal alignment for transit in late 2026.
Blue Origin chief executive Dave Limp said the team had achieved “full mission success”.
“It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds had perfect odds – never before has a booster this large nailed the landing on just the second attempt,” he said. “This is only the beginning as we ramp up launch cadence and continue delivering for customers.”
The ESCAPADE pair, developed by the University of California, Berkeley, will study how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ weak magnetic environment and how that process contributes to atmospheric loss, key to understanding how the planet transitioned from a wetter world to the arid environment seen today.
The mission also included Viasat’s first in-flight demonstration of its HaloNet telemetry relay service, conducted using New Glenn’s second stage as part of NASA’s Communications Services Project.
Acting NASA administrator, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, congratulated Blue Origin and its partners on the milestone.
“This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet and how solar eruptions affect its surface,” he said. “Every New Glenn launch provides data essential to preparing for our MK-1 missions under Artemis, and to protecting future NASA explorers. These insights are also invaluable as we work to realise President Trump’s goal of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.”
Blue Origin said New Glenn is central to its long-term spaceflight ambitions: enabling sustained lunar operations, supporting in-space resource utilisation, providing multi-orbit mobility through its Blue Ring platform, and ultimately establishing commercial destinations in low-Earth orbit.
Multiple New Glenn vehicles are already in production, with several years of customer orders queued. In addition to NASA and Viasat, key customers include Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and a range of global telecommunications operators. This flight also served as New Glenn’s second certification mission for the US National Security Space Launch program.
Jordan Charles, Blue Origin’s vice president for New Glenn, said the mission marked a “new era” for the company.
“Today’s achievement shows what’s possible as we move toward a launch-land-repeat model,” he said. “We’ve made major progress in manufacturing and building ahead of demand. Our focus remains firmly on increasing cadence and executing our growing manifest.”