Blue Origin will launch a rocket with a booster that can be used again for the first time.

On Sunday, Blue Origin, the US space corporation owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, will utilise a booster for the first time to launch its huge New Glenn rocket.

Bezos’s company is in a strong competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and a successful launch on Sunday may speed up and cut the cost of future Blue Origin launches.

The New Glenn rocket is almost 100 meters (328 feet) tall and will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, between 6:45 am (1045 GMT) and 8:45 am. It will carry a satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile that will help with communications.

The corporation has launched the fresh Glenn twice before, but only with fresh rocket engines.

It has already launched its much smaller New Shepard rocket, which is mostly used for suborbital space tourism, using parts that had already been used in a less difficult operation.

In November, Blue Origin successfully retrieved a New Glenn booster for the first time. This was a difficult technical challenge that ended with a controlled vertical landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.

In January 2025, a prior effort to recover the booster failed because its engines didn’t reignite during descent.

After its last flight, the booster that will be utilised for the launch on Sunday was repaired. The business changed all of its engines and made a few minor changes for this first usage.

The two stages of the rocket will split at a high altitude after it takes off. The upper stage will keep going and take the satellite into space. The booster, on the other hand, will go down and try to land on a barge.

As the New Glenn is at the center of Bezos’s plans for space, the operation’s performance will be constantly examined.

He is especially competing with Musk in NASA’s Artemis lunar program, where both of his space enterprises are making lunar landers for the US space agency.

The United States is working even harder to get humans back to the Moon by 2028, which is before President Donald Trump’s term ends and a target set by China.