Blue Origin's 1st recovered New Glenn booster arrives to Port Canaveral

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Nov 18, 2025

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — There are tall, pointy metal tubes aplenty at Port Canaveral, but one is extra large.

The first-ever recovered first-stage booster for Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket arrived to the port Tuesday morning five days after its launch from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36 on the NG-2 mission for NASA.

Its girth stuck out like a massive, freestanding cigarette with a still-white paint job with a gold top standing tall on the port’s skyline littered with cranes, cargo ships and even a pair of competitor SpaceX’s Falcon 9 boosters.

In comparison, the Falcon 9 boosters, which had each traveled to space several times, had the black carbon-scoring soot from multiple reentries.

Blue Origin’s booster, named “Never Tell Me The Odds” in reference to dialogue spoken by Han Solo to C-3PO before successfully navigating an asteroid field in “The Empire Strikes Back,” managed to stick the landing on Blue Origin’s recovery vessel Jacklyn, named after company founder Jeff Bezos’ mother, which had been located about 375 miles downrange.

The vessel with its upright trophy ventured into the port amid the more common sight of the tinier SpaceX boosters, also standing upright on the east side of North Cargo Berth 6, where the port has three mobile harbor cranes to deal with rocket recovery operations.

Blue Origin, though, has its own crane, on the west side of the berth, the tallest point in the port at 375 feet tall, to handle the much larger New Glenn booster.

New Glenn boosters are 189 feet tall compared to the SpaceX boosters’ 135 feet.

New Glenn also has a 23-foot diameter compared to the 12-foot diameter of Falcon 9 rockets.

At launch, the rocket’s combined first and second stages plus fairing rise to 322 feet tall. The first New Glenn mission flew in January, but the booster was not able to make a landing on Jacklyn after problems with its engines relighting, although it did manage to send the upper stage into orbit, which marked the first time an orbital class rocket managed such a feat on its first try.

This second launch, though, brought Blue Origin into the same conversation as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which had its first successful Falcon 9 booster recovery nearly 10 years ago.

SpaceX has since recovered boosters 535 times and reused them 500 times.

Blue Origin looks to reuse its New Glenn boosters up to 25 times, although it has plenty of New Glenn stages already constructed at its nearby manufacturing site in Merritt Island adjacent Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex.

That includes what the company has planned for its next launch to send the company’s uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander to the moon.

The company was originally targeting liftoff of that mission before the end of the year, but is likely to slip into early 2026.

-----------