Ignition Protocol / The commercial era
New Glenn
It reached orbit on its first flight, landed its booster on its second, and then destroyed its only launch pad.
- 98.0 m
- 7.0 m
- 19,928 kN
- 45,000 kg
- 2
- Yes
- Blue Origin
- Private
- 16 January 2025
Ninety-eight metres tall and seven metres across for the full length of the vehicle, with 45,000 kilograms to a 51.6 degree low orbit and a first stage rated for a minimum of twenty-five flights. The thrust figure needs a date on it: the seven BE-4 engines were uprated from 17,219 to 19,928 kilonewtons starting with the third flight, so the first two vehicles left the pad with about fourteen percent less than the number in this record.
The seven metre body is the real point of difference. It gives a fairing wider than anything else currently flying, which is what matters for a large single-piece telescope mirror or a station module, and it is the one place where New Glenn is not simply a late answer to Falcon Heavy.
Three flights, and the record is two for three rather than the clean sweep it is often described as. NG-1 in January 2025 reached orbit and lost the booster on descent. NG-2 in November 2025 landed the booster on the recovery vessel Jacklyn and carried NASA's ESCAPADE probes toward Mars, an unusually serious payload for a second flight. NG-3 in April 2026 flew that same recovered booster again and landed it a second time, but left AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 in an orbit too low to use, and the satellite was deorbited. The booster worked twice; the mission failed.
Then on 28 May 2026 the NG-4 vehicle exploded during a hotfire test at Launch Complex 36, around nine in the evening. Nobody was hurt. The rocket was destroyed and the pad, the only orbital pad Blue Origin has, was badly damaged. On 5 August the company named the cause: the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines.
New Glenn is listed here as flying, which means in service rather than airborne this month. It is grounded, with a manifest of Amazon Leo batches, NASA lunar landers and national security launches waiting on a pad being modified rather than rebuilt. Eighteen months in, the capability is proven and the cadence is not, and only an owner who does not yet need the programme to pay for itself makes a record like that survivable.