By Chandni ShahApril 19 (Reuters) – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin said on Sunday that its New Glenn rocket booster had touched down after launch, marking its first landing of a reused booster and intensifying its rivalry with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.The rocket, which had a launch window of 6:45 a.m. to 12:19 p.m. ET on Sunday, lifted off at around 7:25 a.m. ET (1125 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the booster touchdown happened about 10 minutes later.AdvertisementAdvertisementNew Glenn carried AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite to low-Earth orbit in a flight that marks a pivotal step for the company.The mission was key to demonstrating that New Glenn, a 29-story heavy-lift rocket, has a reliable booster reuse capability and can compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.The rocket’s booster, dubbed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” previously flew on the NG-2 mission in November and was recovered, setting up this week’s milestone attempt.The booster’s name is a nod to a Han Solo line in the film “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”Following a series of delays earlier this month, the mission comes amid a surge of activity in the space sector, including the successful NASA Artemis II lunar flyby that took humans further from Earth than any had traveled before.AdvertisementAdvertisementBlue Origin had said in November that it would build a bigger, more powerful variant of its New Glenn rocket, called New Glenn 9×4.AST SATELLITE CONSTELLATIONNew Glenn is designed for the higher end of the commercial launch market with a seven-meter (23-foot) nose cone allowing it to carry bulkier payloads, including multiple satellites in a single mission.”We foundationally developed New Glenn for what we think space is going to look like 50 to 100 years from now,” said New Glenn Vice President Jordan Charles.AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7, carried into orbit on NG-3, is the second satellite in its next-generation Block 2 constellation. The satellite features what the company describes as the largest commercial communications arr …
