<\/p>\n The booster looked pristine, its white, gold and blue livery sparkling in the afternoon sun. It was quite a departure from the baseline visual most of us have of a landed rocket \u2014 consider a soot-streaked SpaceX Falcon 9<\/a> booster, for instance, its char marks worn like a badge of honor.<\/p>\n Best picks for you<\/p>\n But there’s a simple explanation for the difference between a landed Falcon 9 and a landed New Glenn \u2014 their respective propellants.<\/p>\n SpaceX’s Merlin engines, which power both stages of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy<\/a> rockets, run on liquid oxygen and RP-1, a rocket-grade form of kerosene. Kerosene creates soot when it burns, and Falcon boosters therefore fly through self-generated clouds of this gunk when they come back down to Earth.<\/p>\n New Glenn’s BE-4 first-stage engines, on the other hand, burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combo known as methalox. Methane combustion doesn’t generate appreciable soot, so the big rocket came home clean last week. (New Glenn’s upper stage features two BE-3U engines, which are powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.)<\/p>\n SpaceX has developed a methalox engine of its own, by the way \u2014 Raptor, which powers the company’s next-gen Starship<\/a> megarocket. Starship is designed to help humanity settle Mars, and methane makes sense as a fuel for a Red Planet rocket, according to company founder and CEO Elon Musk<\/a>: It can be produced on Mars from components in the planet’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n \n The New Glenn booster after its successful landing on Nov. 13, 2025. (Image credit: Blue Origin)<\/p>\n Blue Origin will soon find out if the landed New Glenn booster is in as good a shape as it looks: The rocket just made it back<\/a> to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36, where the company will inspect and refurbish it.<\/p>\n The plan is to fly the booster again, and again … and again.<\/p>\n Each New Glenn first stage is designed to launch at least 25 times, in fact. That level of reuse would be quite a feat, but Blue Origin is following a trail that SpaceX has blazed. Multiple Falcon 9 boosters have dozens of flights under their belts, and one has launched a record 31 times<\/a>. That soot is just a cosmetic issue, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket aced its first-ever landing last week \u2014 and even managed to stay pretty,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-274962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763708294_680_tZTPw2bf9ppCJRkxJ7nuHU.png\")
\n<\/p>\n