Blue Origin has unveiled an upgraded New Glenn rocket that will be significantly bigger than its current iteration with enhanced payload capacity. Standing nearly 400 feet tall (121 metres), the bigger New Glenn rocket will have nine BE-4 engines on its booster, increasing the thrust by 50%. The announcement follows the highly successful launch of New Glenn’s second mission which took off with NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars spacecraft. After liftoff, Blue Origin scripted history by landing the 7-engine booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
Good overview of the landing. We nominally target a few hundred feet away from Jacklyn to avoid a severe impact if engines fail to start or start slowly. We’ll incrementally reduce that conservatism over time. We are all excited and grateful for yesterday. Amazing performance by… pic.twitter.com/DCEMsuSyPm
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 14, 2025
Having achieved partial reusability already, the company is now aiming to increase launch cadence and payload delivery. “9×4’s addition to our fleet supports demand for larger commercial mega-constellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security missions,” Blue Origin said in an update.
New Glenn vs Starship Toe To Toe
While New Glenn 3 or NG-3 has been touted as the next big thing, the world’s most powerful rocket tag still belongs to SpaceX’s Starship. This 403-feet-tall (123 metres) launch vehicle has flown on 11 test missions to date and is meant to be fully reusable.
So far, SpaceX has only managed to retrieve the 232-feet-tall (71 metres) Super Heavy Booster twice and plans to recover the second stage in future missions.
The Super Heavy is also way ahead in terms of thrust capacity with 16.7 million lbf, thanks to its 33 Raptor engines, as compared to NG-3 booster’s 5.7 million lbf. This is still a huge upgrade for New Glenn as the booster’s thrust capacity will be 50% greater than the current version.
Notably, Starship will also grow more powerful as SpaceX is building Version 3 of the rocket that will be taller by a few feet with greater thrust capacity.
Apart from the booster, Blue Origin is also juicing up the second stage. The upgraded version will have four BE-4 engines instead of three that will generate over 8,00,000 lbf thrust, more than 100% of the three-engine stage. This will enable the second stage to carry 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit, 14 metric tons to geostationary orbit, and 20 metric tons to Trans Lunar Injection. In contrast, Starship’s upper stage (171 feet/52 metres) can generate 3.3 million lbf with its six Raptor engines. It has a payload capacity between 100 to 150 tons.
On Thursday, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp shared a visualisation of the two New Glenn rockets next to NASA’s Saturn V which launched the Apollo Moon landing missions.
While the company builds the bigger version, it is also enhancing performance of the 7×2 configuration. Blue Origin said in an update that the total thrust for the seven BE-4 booster engines is increasing from 3.9 million lbf to 4.5 million lbf and the upper stage’s from 3,20,000 lbf to 4,00,000 lbf.
SpaceX has retired Starship’s Version 2 and is testing Version 3, although it has already faced some setbacks. The V3 Super Heavy booster suffered significant damage during gas pressure testing ahead of its test flight. This is likely to hinder the progress, allowing Blue Origin to take over as the world’s most powerful operational rocket carrying real payloads.
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