*

Lower-stage booster makes safe return landing at sea

*

Launch marks New Glenn's second flight, following one in

January

*

Rocket deploys two NASA satellites bound for Mars

*

Twin 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 of any kind flown by Blue Origin since the

inaugural launch of a New Glenn vehicle, NG-1, in January 2025.

A live Blue Origin webcast showed the rocket ascending from its

launch tower through clear afternoon skies in a thunder of

flames and billowing clouds of vapor moments after its seven

BE-4 liquid-fueled engines roared to life. The launch followed

several days of delays due to cloudy skies and a geomagnetic

storm.

New Glenn achieved a key engineering objective when

its reusable first-stage booster separated from the rocket's

upper stage minutes after launch and flew back to Earth,

touching down safely on a barge in the Atlantic.

Cheers erupted in Blue Origin's Rocket Park mission control

center at Cape Canaveral as video showed landing of the booster,

dubbed "Never Tell Me the Odds" in a reference to a line spoken

by "Star Wars" hero Han Solo line in the film "The Empire

Strikes Back."

About 20 minutes later, mission control confirmed that New

Glenn's upper stage had achieved its primary mission -

deployment of NASA's twin EscaPADE spacecraft into outer space

to embark on a 22-month voyage to Mars.

BLUE AND GOLD

The dual spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, are due to reach

Mars in 2027 and enter synchronized elliptical orbits for an

11-month study of the planet's space weather environment.

Instruments aboard the satellites will analyze how solar

winds - the fluctuating stream of high-energy charged particles

from the sun - interact with the relatively weak Martian

magnetic field and how that interaction may contribute to

depletion of the thin Martian atmosphere.

EscaPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and

Dynamics Explorers, was originally slated for launch in October

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

development of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

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.

The rocket also carried a secondary payload from the

satellite company Viasat ( VSAT ) that remained attached to the

rocket's upper stage for a technical demonstration of an

in-space communications relay above Earth.

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

Blue Origin's own payload to space - a prototype for its

maneuverable Blue Ring spacecraft that the company is developing

for the Pentagon and commercial customers.

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 its suborbital New

Shepard rocketship, a single-stage reusable vehicle that also

has carried more than 200 research experiments inside its

capsule.

With Thursday's launch, EscaPADE became the first science

payload that Blue Origin has delivered into space for NASA or

any 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 leading rocket launch service.

PLAYING CATCHUP WITH SPACEX

Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars developing New

Glenn, a heavy-lift-class rocket designed to become the

company's workhorse vehicle for flying humans and cargo to

orbit.

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

spacecraft 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 has spent 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

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 its Falcon rockets on nearly 280 missions during the

past two years, most of them serving its own Starlink satellite

business.

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.