New Glenn NG-2 sends ESCAPADE to Mars and lands the booster

Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral had seen one New Glenn fly before, in January 2025, and that booster died in a failed descent over the Atlantic. So when the second New Glenn rose at 3:55 p.m. Eastern on 13 November 2025, Blue Origin had given its first stage a defiant name borrowed from Han Solo: Never Tell Me The Odds. Riding on top were NASA's two smallest Mars orbiters, the twin ESCAPADE probes, the agency's first interplanetary payload entrusted to Jeff Bezos's rocket.

Nine minutes and fifteen seconds after liftoff, the giant first stage descended toward the deck of Jacklyn, a landing ship named for Bezos's mother stationed about 620 miles downrange in the Atlantic, and settled onto it intact. Cheers in the control room turned to something closer to disbelief. No organization other than SpaceX had ever recovered an orbital-class booster, and Blue Origin had done it on the rocket's second flight. The upper stage pressed on, performed a second burn, and released ESCAPADE's twins about 33 minutes after launch, thirty seconds apart.

The probes themselves are an experiment in doing Mars on the cheap. Named Blue and Gold for the colors of UC Berkeley, whose Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission under planetary scientist Rob Lillis, they were built by Rocket Lab for a mission cost of roughly 75 million dollars, a fraction of any previous Mars orbiter. Launched outside a traditional Mars window, they will loiter for a year near the Earth-Sun L2 point, swing past Earth in late 2026, and reach Mars in September 2027 to map how the solar wind strips away the planet's atmosphere.

A Viasat communications demonstration for NASA's Communications Services Project rounded out the manifest, but the night belonged to the booster standing upright on Jacklyn's deck. Almost exactly a decade after SpaceX's first Falcon 9 landing, reusable orbital rocketry finally had a second practitioner, and NASA's bet that commercial heavy lifters could carry science toward other planets had paid off in front of a live audience.