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New Glenn rocket launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida

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It is New Glenn's second voyage, following one in January

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Rocket is carrying two NASA satellites bound for Mars

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Satellites will study solar wind's effects on Mars

By Joe Skipper, Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Nov 13 (Reuters) - The Blue

Origin space venture of billionaire Jeff Bezos launched its

giant New Glenn rocket from Florida on Thursday on its debut

flight for paying customers, carrying two satellites on their

way to Mars in the company's first NASA-scale science mission.

The powerful two-stage rocket, standing 32 stories tall,

blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, marking the

first mission flown by Blue Origin since New Glenn's inaugural

test launch on January 16.

A live Blue Origin webcast showed the rocket ascending from

its launch tower in a roar of flames and billowing clouds of

vapor moments after its seven BE-4 engines thundered to life,

gulping more than 2,800 pounds (1,270 kg) of liquid fuel per

second.

The launch followed several days of delays forced by cloudy

skies and a geomagnetic storm.

If all goes as planned, New Glenn's reusable first-stage

booster will separate from the rocket's upper stage a few

minutes after launch for a return flight to Earth and an

attempted landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean while the

upper stage streaks higher. The return landing maneuver failed

in January due to an engine malfunction.

The primary mission of Thursday's launch involves NASA's

twin EscaPADE spacecraft, designed to orbit Mars in tandem to

analyze how solar winds - streams of high-energy charged

particles from the sun - interact with the planet's magnetic

field and how that interaction might contribute to depletion of

the thin Martian atmosphere.

The dual spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, were set to be

released from the rocket's upper-stage cargo bay about 30

minutes after launch for a 22-month voyage to Mars before going

into satellite mode to begin an 11-month synchronized orbital

study of the Red Planet's space weather environment.

Satellite company Viasat ( VSAT ) also has a payload on

board that will remain attached to the New Glenn rocket's upper

stage in a technical demonstration of an in-space communications

relay above Earth.

PLAYING CATCH-UP WITH SPACEX

EscaPADE - short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and

Dynamics Explorers - originally was slated to launch in October

2024, but was delayed for more than a year by setbacks in

development of New Glenn.

When the rocket made its test flight in January, it carried

Blue Origin's own payload, a prototype for the maneuverable Blue

Ring spacecraft that the company is developing for the Pentagon

and commercial customers.

The Blue and Gold satellites were built for NASA by the

California-based aerospace company Rocket Lab, with instruments

supplied by the University of California, Berkeley.

Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, has until recently

been known mainly for a space tourism business that flies

wealthy passengers to the edge of space in the suborbital New

Shepard, a smaller single-stage reusable vehicle that also has

carried more than 200 research experiments inside its capsule.

If Thursday's launch succeeds, EscaPADE would become the

first science payload delivered to space by Blue Origin for a

paying customer, a key milestone for the Bezos-owned company in

its quest to compete on a more equal footing with Elon Musk's

SpaceX, the world's most active rocket launch service.

SpaceX has launched its Falcon rockets on nearly 280

missions during the past two years, most of them serving its own

Starlink satellite business.

Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars over the past

decade developing New Glenn, a heavy-lift rocket intended to be

the company's workhorse for carrying humans and cargo into

space. Named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth,

it produces two times more thrust at liftoff than SpaceX's

Falcon 9 rocket and about the same as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy

vehicle, while offering more cargo room than any of its rivals.

NASA paid roughly $55 million for the EscaPADE mission - a

modest price-tag relative to the agency's multibillion-dollar

space programs - and has paid Blue Origin $18 million for the

New Glenn flight, according to federal procurement data.

Blue Origin also supplies engines for other companies'

rockets, including United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur. And

it has been working on a crewed moon lander for NASA's Artemis

lunar exploration program, as well as a space station in

collaboration with other entities.

Blue Origin has far to go to catch up with SpaceX, which has

launched several hundred Falcon 9 missions to become the world's

most dominant launch provider, rivaled only by China's space

program.

Musk's company also is developing its next-generation

Starship rocket, a stainless steel behemoth designed to be fully

reusable and serve an array of missions, including flights to

the moon and Mars, and expanding SpaceX's Starlink satellite

network. Starship, once placed into service, would become the

world's most powerful rocket.