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

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.

[72] The development and manufacture of the New Glenn is being funded by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com,[12][80] and the Department of the Air Force.