Blue Origin fires up powerful New Glenn rocket ahead of NASA Mars mission launch (video)

New Glenn is vertical on the pad and its engines are hot.

The second-ever liftoff of Blue Origin‘s powerful New Glenn rocket is approaching as the launch vehicle undergoes final checkouts at Launch Complex-36A (LC-36A), at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. New Glenn will fly NASA’s twin ESCAPADE probes on an ambitious mission to Mars, and could launch as Nov. 9.

The rocket was rolled out to LC-36A the night of Oct. 28, according to a Blue Origin post on X, and went vertical at the pad on Wednesday night (Oct. 29). Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp posted video of the New Glenn Transporter Erector (TE) raising the vehicle the same evening, saying a hot-fire test would follow once the TE was was secured and checkouts complete.

That hot-fire test came on Thursday night (Oct. 30). In a clamped-down ignition, New Glenn’s seven BE-4 first stage engines fired up and performed as planned. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos posted a video of the engine test that night on X, which was followed shortly followed by Blue Origin’s own post announcing the milestone.

“All seven engines performed nominally with a 38-second duration test, including all seven engines operating at 100% thrust for 22 seconds,” Blue Origin said on X.

NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) probes were integrated on top of New Glenn earlier this month at Blue Origin’s Titusville, Florida, facility. The Rocket Lab-built twin spacecraft will head to orbit around Mars, where they will study the Red Planet’s magnetosphere and analyze how energetic solar wind particles interact with the Martian atmosphere.

The duo were originally slated to fly on the first New Glenn launch, which was targeted for 2024. But NASA pulled the probes from the mission due to concerns about relying on an unproven rocket to successfully launch them to Mars.

New Glenn ended up debuting in January 2025, on a test flight that successfully sent a pathfinder version of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring spacecraft to orbit.

The $80 million ESCAPADE mission is a high-profile one for New Glenn’s second launch, which will be NASA’s first mission headed to Mars since the Perseverance rover launched in July 2020, and the first interplanetary launch ever for the new rocket.

Blue Origin will attempt to recover New Glenn’s first stage during the ESCAPADE launch, by way of propulsive landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. The nearly 189-foot-tall (58 meters) booster failed in its landing attempt during its first launch.

Satellite communications company Viasat will fly a technology demonstration as a secondary payload aboard New Glenn on the upcoming launch. That payload is part of NASA’s Communications Services Project, which seeks out commercial partnerships to develop networking capabilities for near-Earth satellites.