New Glenn version
New Glenn New Glenn 7×2
The operational New Glenn: seven methalox BE-4 engines on a reusable first stage and two hydrolox BE-3U engines on an expendable second. It stands 98 m tall, is 7 m across and lifts 45,000 kg to low Earth orbit. It first flew on 16 January 2025 and landed its booster for the first time on 13 November of the same year.
- January 16, 2025
- First launch
- 45,000 kg
- LEO capacity
- 19,928 kN
- Thrust
- Yes
- Reusable
History
A first stage built to come home
New Glenn was designed around reuse from the start. The GS1 first stage lands vertically on a barge in the Atlantic and is rated for a minimum of 25 flights, a figure that replaced the original hundred-flight goal in 2021. The GS2 upper stage shares the 7 m diameter, stands roughly 26.8 m tall and is expendable. Both use orthogrid aluminium tanks and autogenous pressurisation. Blue Origin also explored a reusable upper stage under Project Jarvis from 2021, an effort shelved after the first flight.
A decade of slipping dates
Design work began in 2012 with the BE-4 engine, and the name was announced in September 2016 in honour of John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. The debut was promised for 2020 and slid year after year: 2022, then the fourth quarter of 2023, then 2024. A boilerplate vehicle without working engines was raised on the pad in February 2024; the flight article rolled out on 30 October that year.
Orbit on the first try
On 16 January 2025, after an attempt scrubbed three days earlier, New Glenn lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral and reached orbit at the first attempt, carrying the Blue Ring Pathfinder as a demonstration for the national security launch programme. The booster, named So You're Telling Me There's a Chance, was lost on descent at around Mach 5.5. The mishap investigation, reviewed by the FAA, closed on 31 March 2025.
The landing
On 13 November 2025 the first stage Never Tell Me the Odds touched down on the landing vessel some 600 km off the Atlantic coast, making Blue Origin the second company after SpaceX to put a payload in orbit and recover its booster on the same mission.
A forced pause
The third flight, in April 2026, left AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird satellites badly deployed after an upper-stage malfunction. Worse followed on 28 May 2026, when a vehicle named No, It's Necessary exploded during a static fire and wrecked Launch Complex 36, the company's only working pad. Nobody was hurt, but rebuilding may take more than a year and has thrown the manifest — including the Blue Moon lunar landers — into doubt. A second site at Vandenberg is planned for polar orbits.