Bezos Chases Musk: Can the Second Flight of New Glenn Turn the Tables?
On November 13 local time in the United States, Blue Origin's New Glenn heavy-lift rocket was successfully launched into space, carrying out its second orbital flight mission, NG-2.
The rocket successfully entered space, and the booster safely landed on an unmanned landing platform in the Atlantic Ocean. Booster recovery is a key step in achieving the goal of partial reusability for the New Glenn. After recovery, the booster can be refurbished and used for multiple launch missions.
This launch was interrupted multiple times during the countdown due to adverse weather conditions. On this day, when the clouds finally cleared over Cape Canaveral, Blue Origin seized this fleeting window of opportunity.
Blue Origin's New Glenn heavy-lift rocket was successfully launched into space. The core mission of this mission is to send NASA's ESCAPADE dual Mars orbiters to the Red Planet. This is not only NASA's first restart of a Mars exploration mission in five years but also a crucial competition that Blue Origin has launched against SpaceX.
01 The "Silent Giant" Takes a Decade to Forge: The Long Birth of the New Glenn Rocket
In 2000, when Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin, Elon Musk was still running PayPal. It wasn't until two years later that Musk founded SpaceX. Logically, Bezos should have had the first-mover advantage.
However, the reality is the opposite. While SpaceX has rewritten the rules of commercial spaceflight with the "Falcon 9" and is testing Mars landings with Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn has just completed its second launch. After more than two decades, the pioneer has become the chaser.
Behind this are two completely different "space philosophies."
In sharp contrast to Musk's radical style of "rapidly testing and learning from mistakes, not fearing failure," Bezos chose a completely different path for Blue Origin. Since its founding in 2000, the company has always adhered to the motto "Gradatim Ferociter" (Step by step, boldly), seeking development in a steady manner.
In the first few years after its founding, Blue Origin's activities were hardly known. It wasn't until 2006 that the company purchased land in Van Horn, Texas, and established a test base called "Launch Site One" to promote the New Shepard rocket program.
The New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut. It is a brand-new vehicle tailored for space tourism by Blue Origin. It can take off and land vertically, sending humans and scientific payloads to the suborbital space 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface. During the three minutes of weightlessness, passengers will float in the cockpit with the largest porthole in the history of spaceflight, overlooking the curvature of the Earth from an astronaut's perspective.
After the New Shepard had accumulated mature experience in suborbital flights, Blue Origin set its sights on the more distant stars. In 2015, the company officially announced the launch of a rocket project named after the legendary astronaut John Glenn, and it wasn't until ten years later that we witnessed its birth. Among them, the research and development of the BE - 4 liquid oxygen methane engine, the core technology of the New Glenn rocket, quietly began as early as 2011.
The design of this heavy-lift rocket has undergone several major evolutions. As early as before 2013, preliminary design work had begun; in September 2016, Blue Origin publicly displayed a design plan that included both two-stage and three-stage configurations for the first time. According to the original plan, the first stage would be equipped with seven BE - 4 engines, and the second stage would use a single BE - 4U vacuum-optimized engine.
However, a key turning point occurred in the technical route in March 2018: the power plan for the second stage was changed to two BE - 3U liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen engines. By January 2019, the three-stage configuration was completely abandoned, and the current two-stage configuration was finally determined. Due to factors such as the failure to obtain the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract and technical challenges, the first flight of the New Glenn was repeatedly postponed from the originally planned 2020, and it wasn't until January 16, 2025, that it finally achieved its historic first flight.
As one of the largest launch vehicles ever built, all the key components of the New Glenn, including the BE - 4 and BE - 3U engines, have been independently designed and manufactured by Blue Origin. Currently, the rocket is launched from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. In the future, it will also be extended to Launch Complex 9 at Vandenberg Space Force Base to carry out polar orbit launch missions.
Of particular note is its unique financing model. Different from NASA, which mainly relies on government funding, Blue Origin's development funds mainly come from Bezos' continuous capital injection through the sale of Amazon shares. This unique form of financial support allows the company to adhere to long-termism and focus on achieving Bezos' grand vision: to establish a complete space infrastructure and ultimately make it possible for millions of people to live and work in space.
The picture is made by AI.
02 Why Is Bezos "One Step Behind"? The Mismatch between Conservative Philosophy and Radical Spaceflight
On Blue Origin's development path, Bezos has indeed made some key and correct decisions. He has provided funds for Blue Origin by continuously selling Amazon shares, avoiding the pressure of external financing and allowing the company to focus on technological research and development. The New Shepard rocket successfully achieved its first launch and recovery in 2015 and completed a manned flight in 2021, laying an important foundation for reusable rocket technology.
The year 2021 became a turning point. After Bezos stepped down as Amazon's CEO and fully dedicated himself to Blue Origin, he began to introduce Amazon's efficient operating culture into the company. In 2023, he appointed former Amazon executive Dave Limp as CEO, implemented the concept of "customer orientation," and decentralized decision-making power. These measures significantly accelerated the research and development process of the New Glenn rocket.
In terms of business layout, Bezos has shown strategic vision. Winning 12 launch contracts for Amazon's Kuiper constellation and a $3.4 billion contract for the "Blue Moon" lunar lander in NASA's Artemis lunar program not only bring stable revenue to the company but also provide valuable opportunities for technology verification.
However, Bezos' strategic mistakes in development are also obvious. For example, in the early days, he limited the company's scale to less than a hundred people and controlled the annual budget to $100 million, seriously underestimating the technical difficulty and capital requirements of the space industry. This conservative strategy directly led to the New Glenn rocket taking a full nine years from the release of its design in 2016 to its first flight in 2025, far lagging behind SpaceX's development speed.
The choice of management has also had a negative impact. During the period when Bezos was distracted by Amazon, under the tenure of former CEO Bob Smith (from 2017 to 2023), cultural problems emerged within the company, the research and development of key technologies was repeatedly delayed, and it even led to legal disputes and a crisis in employee satisfaction.
The most controversial aspect is the competition strategy. After losing to SpaceX in the bid for NASA's lunar lander contract in 2021, Blue Origin launched an eight-month legal lawsuit and public relations campaign and even proposed a plan to subsidize $2 billion out of its own pocket. This way of dealing with the situation not only consumed a large amount of resources but also damaged the company's reputation in the government and the industry.
Bezos regards Blue Origin as the "space version of Amazon," emphasizing incremental innovation. However, the space industry requires more disruptive breakthroughs and the ability to iterate quickly. If the New Glenn rocket can achieve high-frequency launches in 2026, Blue Origin may still catch up. Otherwise, this company that started the earliest may gradually lose its competitiveness in the increasingly fierce space race.
Image source: Blue Origin official website
03 The Dispute over Space Routes between the Two Giants
In the field of commercial spaceflight, the competition between Bezos and Musk has evolved into a direct confrontation between two technical routes. Although Starship and New Glenn differ in size and goals, both are regarded as representatives of the "new generation of heavy-lift launch vehicles," symbolizing a strategic shift in commercial spaceflight from single-use launches to reusable systems.
In terms of payload capacity, the New Glenn's low Earth orbit payload capacity reaches 45 tons, and its estimated payload capacity in low Earth orbit is over 70 tons. Coupled with its iconic approximately 22 - meter-long fairing, it is particularly suitable for launching large satellites and space station modules. In contrast, Starship's payload capacity is even more astonishing. In the recoverable mode, its low Earth orbit payload capacity reaches over a hundred tons, enabling it to meet the launch requirements for overweight payloads such as space station construction and large deep-space probes.
In terms of reuse strategies, both focus on the recovery of the large first stage to significantly reduce launch costs and increase launch frequency, but there are differences in the degree of reuse. Starship uses an all-stainless-steel structural design with the goal of achieving full reuse of the booster and the upper stage, creating a high-frequency round-trip system similar to the "space shuttle." The New Glenn, on the other hand, has chosen a more conservative and incremental approach. Its first stage is designed to be reusable, while the second stage is currently single-use - however, Blue Origin has launched the "Jarvis Project" to develop a reusable upper stage and gradually move towards full reuse.
From the perspective of design philosophy, the New Glenn continues Blue Origin's engineering concept of "progressing step by step," adopting a proven two-stage structure and modular design to strike a balance between reliability and innovation - it stands at 98 meters tall with a 7 - meter-diameter rocket body and is equipped with seven BE - 4 liquid oxygen methane engines. In contrast, SpaceX's Starship adheres to the thinking of "extreme innovation," with a total system height of 120 meters, a 9 - meter-diameter rocket body, and a configuration of 33 Raptor engines, demonstrating a more radical engineering design.
In addition, Falcon Heavy from SpaceX is also a strong competitor that the New Glenn faces.
The Falcon Heavy consists of three reusable "Falcon 9" nine - engine core stages. It is approximately 70 meters long, 12.2 meters in diameter, and has a liftoff mass of approximately 1,420 tons. Its 27 Merlin engines generate over 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equivalent to the power of approximately 18 Boeing 747 aircraft. The Merlin engines use liquid oxygen/rocket - grade kerosene as propellants and adopt a gas generator cycle power scheme. These engines were originally designed for reuse.
Since its first orbital launch and recovery in 2018, the Falcon Heavy has completed 11 missions. After years of iterative optimization, its first - stage recovery technology has become quite mature.
In contrast, although the New Glenn has successfully reached orbit, its first stage has not yet been verified for recovery, and the system's reliability still needs to be improved. With similar payload capacities and launch prices, the New Glenn has not yet shown obvious advantages in direct competition with the Falcon Heavy. However, for the sake of balance, NASA still allocates some launch missions to Blue Origin to counterbalance SpaceX's dominance.
04 Future Ambitions: Mars, Lunar Missions, and the Amazon Constellation - The "Strategic Deployment" of the New Glenn
The NG - 2 mission is just the prelude to the New Glenn rocket's space journey. As 2026 approaches, this heavy - lift launch vehicle will face a series of key missions.
The first mission is the "Blue Moon Pathfinder 1" mission scheduled for January 2026. This mission will carry a prototype of Blue Origin's self - developed "Blue Moon" Mark 1 lunar lander to achieve a precise soft landing on the lunar surface. Of particular note is that the lander will carry the SCALPSS scientific payload, which can monitor the interaction between the engine plume and lunar surface materials in real - time, accumulating key data for future large - scale lunar development. As an important part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, this mission marks Blue Origin's official entry into the competition for lunar exploration.
Following this is the "Elytra - 1 Orbital Transfer Mission" for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office. This rapid - response space service will verify the New Glenn rocket's application potential in the military and national security fields.
The New Glenn launch mission in the middle of 2026 is even more of a milestone. The rocket will deploy the first 49 internet satellites for Amazon's Kuiper project. Although the Kuiper project and Blue Origin are both under companies founded by Bezos, the two companies operate independently.
Looking ahead to 2027, the New Glenn rocket will take on another important task, the "Blue Moon Pathfinder 2" mission. Dramatically, this mission will carry the VIPER lunar rover that was canceled in 2024, continuing to support NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
According to the plan, the New Glenn rocket will carry out a maximum of eight launch missions per year. Even if the co - passenger payloads are not ready on time, the rocket will still be launched as planned, and no additional fees will be charged to other customers. This business model centered on launch timeliness is in sharp contrast to traditional space launch services.
This article is from "Tencent Technology", author: Jin Lu, Helen. Republished by 36Kr with permission.