Every Cosmic Herald story on Blue Origin — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft is set to launch on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima on Oct. 19. It aims to bring about 10 grams of Phobos back to Earth in 2031, carrying NASA hardware and a French-German rover along the way.
Read the story →NASA added Blue Origin's New Glenn 9x4 to its NLS II launch contract on Sept. 29, 2026. It makes the rocket eligible to compete for missions, but no mission, first-flight date or orbital demo has been announced.
Rocket Lab filed a GAO protest on September 11 against NASA's ~$700 million award of the Mars Telecommunications Network orbiter to Blue Origin, arguing the evaluation broke with Congress's own eligibility rules.
NASA has directed Axiom Space to build a stripped-down 'Sortie Suit' after safety and oversight reviews warned the original lunar suit was too heavy and too complex to meet a 2028 landing.
NASA picked Blue Origin over a competing Rocket Lab bid for a ~$700 million contract to build a Blue Ring-based Mars telecom orbiter due at the Red Planet by 2030.
NASA on-ramped four companies — All Points Logistics, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, and L3Harris — to a $100 million payload processing contract that expands where commercial providers can prep spacecraft for launch.
Blue Origin says a single malfunctioning main oxygen valve on a BE-4 engine destroyed New Glenn and 48 Amazon Leo satellites in May, with fixed hardware due late August and flights targeted before year's end.
NASA and Blue Origin have agreed to prep the historic B-2 test stand at Stennis to hot-fire New Glenn's two-engine, LOX/LH2 second stage this fall — a move that ties the rocket's readiness directly to Artemis.
The Space Force tripled its NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 ceiling to $17 billion across seven launch providers on July 17, 2026 — but a GAO report showing commercial launches at federal ranges have more than quadrupled since 2021 suggests the real bottleneck isn't rockets, it's the ground beneath them.
NASA has tapped SpaceX to mount two Starlink mini laser terminals on Orion for Artemis III, beaming 4K docking-test footage to Houston over infrared light as the mission is reframed into a 2027 low-Earth-orbit rehearsal of crewed lander rendezvous ahead of a 2028 Moon landing.
NASA's July 15 breakdown of the 2027 Artemis III demo reveals how far apart SpaceX and Blue Origin's test articles are: astronauts will open the hatch on Blue Moon Mark 2, but never set foot inside a 171-foot Starship that docks nose-first with a bolted-on docking system and no crew cabin.
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, New Glenn, Vulcan Centaur, Neutron, Ariane 6, and six more launch vehicles compared on payload, cost per launch, and reusability, including China's Long March 10B, which on July 10 became just the third rocket in history to catch its own booster.
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