On November 13, 2025, Blue Origin flew its New Glenn rocket for the second time, dispatched NASA’s ESCAPADE pair toward Mars, ran a communications test for Viasat, and then landed the first stage on a platform in the Atlantic. With that splashdown, the venture Jeffrey Bezos started in 2000, beating Elon Musk’s SpaceX by two years, became only the second entity on Earth to vertically land an orbital-class booster, a club whose only other member is SpaceX.
Clayton Swope’s assessment for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, published the next day, treats the landing as the payoff to a 25-year build that critics spent most of calling too slow.
Founded first, flying later
Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000, and Elon Musk set up SpaceX two years later, but for its first decade Bezos’s company worked in near total secrecy, unveiling a plan for a reusable suborbital crewed rocket, New Shepard, only in 2010. Work on the BE-4 orbital-class engine began in 2011. Observers regularly described the outfit as sluggish and meandering next to SpaceX’s fail-fast style; Swope’s fairer reading is that both approaches produced working rockets. The Goddard demonstrator, New Shepard and finally the heavy-lift New Glenn were checked off methodically, if with less fanfare.
The money came mostly from the founder. Bezos called the venture his “most important work” in a 2018 interview and said he measures its success over “a couple of hundred years”. As of 2023 he had poured over $10 billion of personal money into it, alongside some Pentagon funding for New Glenn awarded in 2018.
Engine first, rocket second
The BE-4 set the pace. It first reached space on the maiden flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan in January 2024, and New Glenn itself followed a year later, debuting in January 2025 with a successful payload deployment but a missed booster landing. The second flight in November 2025 completed the checklist. The engine count now defines the company’s challenge: seven BE-4s power each New Glenn and two go into every Vulcan, so production rate is the gate on everything.
The queue waiting on the rocket
Demand is not the problem. In its Federal Aviation Administration application for Cape Canaveral operations, Blue Origin said it expects up to 12 launches per year; it managed two in 2025, with the third not expected before January 2026. That third launch is booked for Blue Moon Mark 1, an uncrewed lunar cargo lander meant to prove technologies for the Mark 2 crewed lander NASA picked for Artemis. Amazon signed on in 2022 for 12 launches, with options for 15 more, to deploy its Amazon Leo broadband constellation, and the Space Force awarded New Glenn launch contracts in April 2025.
NASA, meanwhile, is watching the calendar. The agency’s acting administrator has floated reopening competition for crewed lunar landers as an alternative to SpaceX’s Starship system, which could accelerate the Mark 2 from its Artemis V slot in 2029 to Artemis III, planned for 2028, with China aiming to land its own crews by 2030.
Why the patience? Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck put it plainly in 2024: developing rockets is “just really freaking hard to do and there is zero margin for error”. Even Starship, first sketched by Musk in 2005 for 100-ton payloads, remains in test after more than 10 launch attempts. Blue Origin’s slower road has simply arrived at fewer fireballs, and now at a landing.
