Blue Origin, the U.S. space company of billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket launched from Florida on Sunday (19 April), in the latest chapter of its intensifying rivalry with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The rocket lifted off at around 7:25 a.m. ET (1125 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, with the booster touchdown coming about 10 minutes later.
The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters.
However, the uncrewed mission also faced a setback as the rocket failed to deploy a communications satellite into a high enough orbit.
The satellite designed by Texas firm AST was part of the company’s effort to build a space-based cellular broadband network, similar to SpaceX’s Starlink.
"While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will (be) de-orbited," AST said.
In a response to a post on X from Bezos regarding Sunday's launch, Musk congratulated him.
Sunday's mission, the third for New Glenn, was key to demonstrating that it has a reliable booster reuse capability and can compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The rocket’s booster is dubbed "Never Tell Me the Odds," a nod to Han Solo’s line in the film ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.’
The mission came amid a surge of activity in the space sector.
Earlier in April, NASA’s Artemis II mission made history with a lunar flyby that took the astronauts further from earth than ever before.
SpaceX is building a special version of its Starship designed to land astronauts on the moon, as part of NASA’s Artemis programme.
Blue Origin is developing a more traditional lander and aims to achieve an uncrewed soft lunar landing this summer.
The developments come amid a U.S. space race with China to return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.
Beijing, which plans to land its first crewed mission on the moon by 2030, is considered to currently be ahead in the contest.
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