How does blue origin land?

Two objects come back from every New Shepard flight, and they land in completely different ways. The booster falls tail first, stabilised by a ring fin at the top that shifts its centre of pressure, and by drag brakes that slow it and steady the descent. Close to the ground the BE-3PM engine relights and throttles deeply, the landing gear deploys, and the stage settles on a concrete pad a short distance from where it lifted off. The crew capsule separates far above and comes down on its own: drogue chutes first, then three main parachutes, and in the last instant before touchdown a burst of gas that cushions the impact on the desert floor.

New Glenn's first stage is far larger and travels much faster, so it cannot simply fly back to the launch site. It slows with engine burns, steers with aerodynamic strakes and lands on six legs aboard a vessel stationed downrange in the Atlantic. Blue Origin designs the stage for a minimum of twenty-five flights. The first attempt, in January 2025, failed during the descent while the mission itself succeeded; the second, later the same year, put the booster on the ship intact.

Vertical landing exists for one reason: the first stage is the expensive part of a launcher, and dropping it into the ocean once per flight puts a floor under the price of reaching space. Recovery also returns hardware for inspection, which is how a programme learns what actually wears out and how fast. The cost is performance, because the propellant kept in reserve for the landing burn is propellant not available to lift payload, and every landing leg is mass that flies all the way up.