“On its second try, Blue Origin nailed the landing of its New Glenn rocket booster on Thursday.

A booster landing is not a novel feat. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, accomplished it for the first time a decade ago with its Falcon 9 rocket, and it now performs it routinely, most recently on Monday night.

But no other company had pulled that off for an orbital-class rocket, until Blue Origin.

With two successful launches in a row, New Glenn could win a sizable slice of the business of sending stuff to space…

Thursday’s launch also accomplished its primary task: launching ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, a NASA mission that will head to Mars to measure the magnetic fields buffeting charged particles around that planet.

The two small identical spacecraft that comprise the mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, were successfully deployed 33 minutes after launch. They will first loop around Lagrange-2, one of five points in space where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth balance. Later in November, they will fire their engines in a maneuver that will use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to send them on a trajectory to Mars.”

From New York Times.