It's hard to communicate just how much I was amazed that Blue managed to achieve all the major goals of today's New Glenn 2 launch. They had a hold at the originally scheduled launch time, but launched around 45 minutes later. The launch and flight appeared to be completely by the book, but importantly and surprisingly, they succeeded in landing the booster on their offshore drone Jacklyn around 360 miles ESE of the Cape.
Screen capture from the NASA Spaceflight live coverage. That video is the entire NSF coverage - over 5-1/2 hours - but set to start at 3 hrs 57 mins 00 secs.
This means that Blue Origin is only the second company in history to recover a rocket for reuse at the end of an operational flight. That has to have huge positive impacts on Blue Origin's financial health. I think everyone knows SpaceX has had so much success with their landing and reuse that they hardly ever launch a new booster. With their fleet leader at 32 flights, think of what that means to the cost to fly a mission. They have a fleet that's tough to get a number for, but on the order of 20 boosters. (One of the complications is the same hardware could be first stage for a Falcon 9, a side booster or even the central core of a Heavy - from mission to mission).
Capable of carrying up to 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO), New Glenn is comparable to, but not quite as powerful as, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, and has nearly twice the lifting capacity as United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur. Blue Origin intends to position the 321-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn to take on some of the Falcon 9's current share of the launch market.
Going through old posts looking for things I'd swear I remember, I found I correctly remembered that there was a version of New Glenn that had three stages. The last post that showed that was in October of 2020.
Since it's a graphic they produced, I'm going to trust they have the relative sizes of the different New Glenn versions shown correctly as well as the sizes of the other vehicles compared to theirs. I haven't seen anything on that 3-stage version since then.
While the New Glenn is the subject of the post, I need to point out that mission successfully deployed the two ESCAPADE satellites, now en route to the L2 LaGrange point, as well as a previously unmentioned other payload for ViaSat to test that company's InRange launch telemetry relay service as part of a project for NASA's Communications Services Project (CSP).
It looks like a rather complete success for Blue Origin. As one of the NASASpaceflight announcers said, seeing another private American company become capable of landing and recovering a booster is like suddenly being pushed into the future. We know that other companies talk about recovering boosters and Rocket Lab has done some reuse. We've also seen experiments from Japan, China, and the European Union. For now it seems like there has been major step toward that dream scenario of a space-faring civilization.
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