Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its towering New Glenn rocket on a mission that marked its first major test.

Carrying a pair of satellites that are destined to take a long, winding trip to Mars, New Glenn took flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station just before 4 p.m. ET Thursday.

Blue Origin also landed the first stage of the rocket back on a seafaring platform for the first time, marking a monumental stride forward in the company’s efforts to make the New Glenn rocket reusable, less expensive, and a better competitor for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Blue Origin had been slated to launch the NASA mission, called Escapade, on Sunday, but cloud cover resulted in the decision to postpone liftoff. The company then had to work with the Federal Aviation Administration, which recently implemented a ban on most rocket launches during daylight hours amid the government shutdown, to find a new opportunity to take off.

The launch of Escapade — short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers — marked the first flight for New Glenn with a customer payload onboard. The rocket completed its inaugural flight in January carrying Blue Origin-made demonstration technology in its cargo bay.

During that January mission, the company failed to recover New Glenn’s first-stage booster, which is the bottommost portion of the rocket that gives the vehicle its initial burst of power at liftoff.

Blue Origin attributed the failed attempt to engines that did not properly reignite. But the company did not appear to experience any such issues Thursday, as New Glenn’s first stage made a clean touchdown on a seafaring barge named Jacklyn after Bezos’ mother.

Much like Blue Origin’s chief competitor, SpaceX — which has long been a dominant force in the commercial launch business — New Glenn is designed to be partially reused in order to drive down costs.

Failing to land the rocket booster does not necessarily affect how companies assess the overall success of a mission, as the primary goal of any rocket launch is to safely deliver its cargo to orbit. But Blue Origin had made clear before takeoff that the steps of recovering and reflying parts of its rockets are crucial to the company’s business model.

And Blue Origin said it has spent the past 10 months largely focused on tweaking the New Glenn vehicle in the hopes of guaranteeing a successful booster landing.

A landmark Mars mission

For this mission, New Glenn had among the most exciting tasks a rocket can be assigned. It delivered the twin Escapade satellites on a path toward Lagrange Point 2, or L2 — a cosmic balance point about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.

Lagrange Points can be useful for various types of missions because they allow spacecraft to potentially stay in orbit for a very long time while using minimal fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, is in orbit around L2.

In this case, however, the Escapade satellites will use L2 as a sort of orbital backroad in which to linger as they wait for their destination — Mars — to travel closer to Earth along its orbital path. In late 2026, when the next Mars transfer window opens, the satellites will then depart L2, briefly swing back by Earth, and set off on their final trek to the red planet.

Both spacecraft are slated to enter Martian orbit in September 2027.

Only then will Escapade begin its core science mission. Led by the University of California, Berkeley, a team of researchers will study the planet’s atmosphere — working to evaluate why Mars began to lose its once-dense atmosphere billions of years ago and assess radiation conditions for future explorers.

“Throughout the Escapade mission, the two satellites will take simultaneous measurements from nearly the planet’s entire upper atmosphere and magnetosphere, ranging from altitudes between approximately 100 and 6,200 miles (160 and 10,000 kilometers),” according to a UC Berkeley news release about the mission. “Coordinated, multipoint observations are necessary to … unravel the chain of cause and effect within the system.”

Escapade is part of NASA’s SIMPLEx — or Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration — program, which aims to spur researchers and companies to devise ways to use small, inexpensive spacecraft to carry out science investigations at far cheaper than typical price points.

The mission’s cost was estimated to be less than $100 million, compared with the roughly $300 million to $600 million price tags of other NASA satellites orbiting Mars.

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