New Glenn is a heavy-lift launch vehicle developed and operated by the American company Blue Origin.

The rocket is named in honor of NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.

Its maiden flight took place on 16 January 2025, carrying a prototype Blue Ring spacecraft, marking the first launch from LC-36 since NROL-23 in 2005.

[11] Blue Origin publicly released the high-level design of the vehicle and announced the name New Glenn—with both two-stage and three-stage variants planned—in September 2016.

From the earliest design concepts, the first-stage booster was to be refueled and relaunched to reduce costs of access for humans to space.

[9] Engine testing for the (then-named) Reusable Booster System (RBS) launch vehicle began in 2012.

[19] In a February 2016 interview, Blue Origin president Rob Meyerson referred to engine development and orbital launch vehicle milestones.

New Glenn was described as a 7 m (23 ft) diameter, two- or three-stage rocket, with the first and second stages being liquid methane/liquid oxygen (methalox) designs using Blue Origin engines.

[27] By mid-2018, the low-level design was not yet complete and the likelihood of achieving an initial launch by 2020 was being called into question by company engineers, customers, industry experts, and journalists.

[28][29] In October 2018, the Air Force announced Blue Origin was awarded US$500 million for development of New Glenn as a potential competitor in future contracts, including Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) Phase 2.

[31][32] By February 2019, several launches for New Glenn had been contracted: five for OneWeb, an unspecified amount of Telesat, one each for Eutelsat, mu Space Corp and SKY Perfect JSAT.

[33][34][19][35][15] In February 2019, Blue Origin indicated that no plans to build a reusable second stage were on the company's roadmap.

[36] In the event, by July 2021, Blue Origin was again evaluating options for getting to a reusable second-stage design: Project Jarvis.

[37] Beyond the technical changes indicated, Bezos created a new management structure for the new efforts, walling off "parts of the second-stage development program from the rest of Blue Origin [telling] its leaders to innovate in an environment unfettered by rigorous management and paperwork processes".

As of August 2021[update], three approaches are being explored: adding wings to allow the stage to operate as a spaceplane on reentry; using an aerospike engine on the second stage that could double as a heat shield on reentry; and an approach similar to SpaceX's Starship concept using high-drag flaps in combination with propulsive deceleration.

[45][needs update] On 12 June 2024 Blue Origin received the communications license for the inaugural flight of New Glenn.

[47] Preparations began in earnest in late August for what was to be New Glenn's debut launch, carrying the ESCAPADE mission consisting of two Photon satellites destined for Mars on a VADR contract from NASA.

Telemetry showed that the booster was traveling at an approximate speed of Mach 5.5 at an altitude of 84,226ft (25.7 km) before it was deemed lost.

[61] The first stage (GS1[62][63]) is designed to be reusable for a minimum of 25 flights,[40] and will land vertically, a technology previously developed by Blue Origin and tested in 2015–2016 on its New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle.

[5] The second stage will be powered by two BE-3U vacuum optimized engines, also designed and manufactured by Blue Origin, using hydrogen/oxygen as propellants.

[15][71] Blue Origin planned as of 2018 to offer both single-payload dedicated flights and, after the fifth launch, dual-manifesting of large communications satellites to be transported to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

[34][35][73] In January 2019, Telesat signed a multi-launch contract "to launch satellites for its future low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation on multiple New Glenn missions" and thus is Blue Origin's fifth customer.

[74] In 2022, Amazon announced that it had contracted 12 flights of New Glenn, with an option for 15 more, for deployment of the Kuiper satellite constellation.

[75] In February 2023, NASA announced that it had selected Blue Origin to launch the ESCAPADE spacecraft to Mars.

SpaceX and International Launch Services can offer dual-launch contracts, but prefer dedicated missions.