Blue Origin lands New Glenn rocket booster on second try
77 comments
·November 13, 2025ChuckMcM
stingrae
Doesn't ULA use Blue Origin's rocket engines?
JumpCrisscross
Yes, for Vulcan [1].
[1] https://spacenews.com/evolution-of-a-plan-ula-execs-spell-ou...
irjustin
Yes, which makes it even harder for ULA to compete.
justapassenger
> It will compete more with Falcon Heavy than Starship
Starship is vaporware, so there's nothing to compete with.
JumpCrisscross
> Starship is vaporware
Vaporware is "late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled" [1].
Starship is late, so you're pedantically correct. But so is New Glenn, and it started being developed when Falcon 9 made its first trip to the ISS. (2012.)
SEJeff
And Blue Origin was incorporated a few years prior to SpaceX. They’ve been working on this problem significantly longer than SpaceX, so they were more confident in their approach.
Gagarin1917
[dead]
justapassenger
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporware
"a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"
It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available, but only thing it'll share with original announced product is a name. Nowhere close on the cost/features/scale/etc.
Only things that were shown so far are prototypes that are many iterations away from being anywhere close to a product.
New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps.
trhway
>Starship is vaporware
absolutely. Majestic 6000 tons of glowing hot vapor every launch.
null
computerdork
wow, given the recent starship milestones that were reached, this is a really strange comment (well, they are behind schedule, but that's Elon Musk way of working).
okay_yes
</sarcasm>? If not, why do you think Starship is vaporware?
justapassenger
There are prototype that are called Starship.
There's nothing even remotely reassembling what was advertised to the public (and sold to the government) as Starship.
It's Duke Nukem Forever.
Rover222
Insane that it took a decade for another company to do it, but better late than never. Great to see. Next up: China.
perihelions
The Zhuque-3 attempt should be a few weeks away,
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/... ("China's 1st reusable rocket test fires engines ahead of debut flight")
Rover222
I bet the next 5 companies/entities that do it are Chinese.
dotancohen
Interesting to see how many are using methlax now as well.
h1fra
I wish EU was next but we slept too much on this one
speed_spread
Mbah, just copy China's rockets once they stop exploding. It would be embarrassing for them to complain about a little industrial espionnage.
LightBug1
Competition is good. We desperately needed competition or, at the very least, a viable strategic alternative to the WankerX - and now we have one.
Yes, China. But would also love to see Honda step it up a bit for Japan. (NSX edition!)
NetMageSCW
A bit early to say that given BO has had two launches 11 months apart and SpaceX has had 142 launches and landings in the same timeframe. With most of them in reused boosters.
rishabhaiover
Classic 110 IQ comment.
throwaway132448
Maybe it tells you a lot about the real commercial demand for this.
Rover222
SpaceX launches 90% of the payload of the entire world to orbit now.
throwaway132448
I’m not sure how that’s relevant? Or do you think it’s typical for valuable markets to field no other competitors for a decade in the 21st century?
bloudermilk
Wild! Does that count their own Starlink payloads? Curious what this number looks like when you only look at the launch customer market.
7e
How much of that is self dealing Starlink?
syncsynchalt
Over eleven years after Blue Origin patented landing a rocket on a barge, and nearly ten years after SpaceX's first "ASDS" (barge) landing, Blue Origin has finally successfully landed a rocket on a barge.
We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.
computerdork
although, they were doing it with a more complicated vehicle than the falcon 9, so the delay is "somewhat" understandable.
And only "somewhat," because new glenn seemed to take forever compared to starship. It does go to show, maybe the highly iterative approach that spacex takes really is faster (or, it could just be spacex has more highly skilled engineers, but I for one can't tell what the reasons are).
syncsynchalt
It's not about the delay, they can take as long as they want to build what they want to build. I object to their attempt to use patents to block competitors for decades when they didn't even have a product yet.
Fortunately it was challenged and the USPTO invalidated patent 8,678,321: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-08-...
niwtsol
Video of the launch if anyone was looking for it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iheyXgtG7EI&t=14220s
consumer451
There is a lot to talk about here. However, the bolts that fired from the landing legs into the ship's deck were really neat. [0]
It was likely one of the simplest things involved, but SpaceX never did this. It seems far simpler than SpaceX's OctaGrabber. I think you can buying something similar at Home Depot?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/iheyXgtG7EI?si=zXnZ_lMAEoWjzpzg...
pipsterwo
Did anyone else notice the pyrotechnics in the landing feet after touchdown? I'm going to assume that they harpooned the deck surface to secure the booster.
Im pretty impressed at how simple that idea is compared to SpaceX's solution which is to have a robot drive underneath and grab the booster
NetMageSCW
Welding isn’t great for reuse. SpaceX experimented with it early on.
computerdork
Interesting, did see a couple of small pops after landing on the drone ship, was that them?
ricardobeat
Full launch video and images of the landing: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
d_silin
Competition is good. SpaceX is de-facto Amazon of space logistics.
le-mark
We are witnessing the birth of the age of Rocket Tycoons. Who will be the first to publish this video game?
computerdork
agreed, new glenn will only make the space industry as a whole better
sbuttgereit
Beautiful launch and landing.
I still can't stand the public relation heavy official stream... but even with all that static the rocket itself cut through.
computerdork
agreed, they need to pick more engineer focused people who love building rockets rather than impersonal PR people. Sometimes, the broadcast felt like a standard business seminar.
ortusdux
Anyone know more about the explosive landing feet anchors at T+9:55?
stingrae
Potentially welding the feet to the deck detailed in this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240124165A1/en
mannyv
Go Limp Go!
For all the engineers that say management doesn't matter, I give you David Limp.
Management doesn't matter until it does.
WJW
What makes you believe it was his management specifically instead of other factors? AFAICT he has been at Blue Origin for only a few years, so the root of their success may have been laid much earlier and they succeeded either because or despite his influence.
Not saying he's a bad manager, just that the fact this one launch was a success is not proof of his skills. Luck is definitely still a possibility. And as a sibling comment mentions, it's not like he has a flawless track record.
pinkmuffinere
I worked under Dave Limp for multiple years in Amazon's Consumer Devices group (like way under, I think he was my manager's skip manager?). I like him personally. But:
(1) His management in the Consumer Devices group did not lead to success, I feel we (and especially the consumer robotics group) basically floundered for 7 years :(
(2) He only left Devices to join Blue Origin like 2 years ago. 2 years is a decent length of time, but far too short for us to credit this success to him -- there have been many other forces building Blue Origin to what it is today. Maybe he gets 30% credit?
p.s. no offense to Mr. Limp, I must emphasize that he was a kind, polite, caring person, and certainly had the capacity for great decisions. It is unfortunate that Consumer Devices and CoRo hasn't had great success, and success may yet be just around the corner.
roman_soldier
Congrats but it's kinda like a company, releasing in 2030, an LLM equivalent to the first version of chatGPT. SpaceX did this 10 years ago.
ceejayoz
Or like Apple releasing an MP3 player?
roman_soldier
I think this is more like the Fire phone vs the iPhone.
throwaway132448
What do you think they’ll call the next barge? I’m hoping for Wernher. Or Kurt.
whoaoweird
After von Braun and Debus? Who were both members of the SS? (Yes, that SS.)
There's a LOT of important people who worked on space programs who were not also literal Nazis.... Why are you hoping for those two, specifically?
WJW
Ey calm down now. They were some of the most visible members of the US space program, and many people like them for providing that service. That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.
whoaoweird
> Ey calm down now
I don't think anyone here is not calm?
I'm suggesting the set of names to draw from is large. There's tons and tons of names that could be chosen. The of the potentially dozens or hundreds of names that are hugely influential, the first two picked were from the SS?
You could name it Neil, Alan, John, Yuri, Valentina, Katherine, Konstantin, Buzz, Mae, Sally, Sergei, Maxime, Margaret, Katherine, or Mary.
All of whom are well established critical figures in rocketry history. And not members of the SS.
> Not everything is about nazism
Of course not! But sometimes it does involve literal Nazis, in which case it's not not about nazism.
shkkmo
> That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.
Even with the good faith assumption that is not why these names were suggested, I don't think it is appropriate to commemorate these people by naming stuff after them.
Von Braun had a history of bending the truth to minimize his membership in the Nazi party and climb up the ranks of the SS. It is hard to take him at his word that he did so purely to advance his career.
It is also worth noting that the career that led to him being promotoed 3 times by Himmler had as it's key accomplishment the development of the novel V2 rocket weapons that killed an average of 2 civilians per launch. Von Braun oversaw production in slave labor camps that killed even more people building the rockets than the rockets killed on impact.
There's many heroes of the space industry to name stuff after who weren't also literal nazis who directly used slave labor to advance their career.
magicalhippo
Can't be von Braun, he didn't care where they came down[1].
Congrats to the Blue Origin team! That's a heck of a milestone (landing it on the second attempt). It will compete more with Falcon Heavy than Starship[1] but it certainly could handle all of the current GEO satellite designs. I'm sure that the NRO will appreciate the larger payload volume as well. Really super glad to see they have hardware that has successfully done all the things. The first step to making it as reliable as other launch platforms. And having a choice for launch services is always a good thing for people buying said launch services.
Notably, from a US policy standpoint, if they successfully become 'lift capability #2' then it's going to be difficult to ULA to continue on.
[1] Although if Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change.