This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Jeff Bezos is back in startup mode (sort of) with Project Prometheus — a $6.2 billion AI-for-the-physical-world venture that instantly became one of the most talked-about new companies in tech. We dig into what this really means, why the company’s location is still a mystery, and how this echoes the era when Bezos was regularly launching big bets from Seattle.
Then we look at Amazon’s latest real-world experiment: package-return kiosks popping up inside Goodwill stores around the Seattle region. It’s a small pilot, but it brings back memories of the early days when Amazon’s oddball experiments seemed to appear out of nowhere.
And finally…Todd tries to justify his scheme to upgrade his beloved 2007 Toyota Camry with CarPlay, Android Auto, and a backup camera — while John questions the logic of sinking thousands of dollars into an old car.
All that, plus a mystery Microsoft shirt, a little Seattle nostalgia, and a look ahead to next week’s podcast collaboration with Me, Myself and AI from MIT Sloan Management Review.
With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.
Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.
© Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Just a week after a successful launch of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it will make New Glenn even heavier.
The new super-heavy-lift variant of Blue Origin’s most powerful rocket, known as New Glenn 9×4, will feature nine methane-fueled BE-4 engines on the first stage, up from seven; and four hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engines on the second stage, up from two. The 9×4 rocket will also have a bigger fairing, or nose-cone section, measuring 8.7 meters (28.5 feet) wide, as opposed to 7 meters (23 feet) for the fairing currently in use.
Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin says it’s working to enhance the performance of the rocket engines on both the New Glenn 9×4 and the standard 7×2 model. Other upgrades will include a reusable fairing, a lower-cost tank design and a higher-performing thermal protection system.
The upgrades will be phased into upcoming New Glenn missions starting with the next launch, which is expected to occur early next year. “These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low Earth orbit, the moon and beyond,” the company said today in an online update.
Customers can choose between the variants for missions to low Earth orbit (including satellite launches for the Amazon Leo internet mega-constellation); to the moon and deep space (including next year’s Blue Moon Mark 1 uncrewed lunar landing); and for national security missions such as the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system.
Blue Origin said the 9×4 model will be capable of carrying more than 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit (vs. 45 tons for the 7×2), more than 14 tons to geosynchronous orbit, and more than 20 tons on a trip from Earth to the moon. That would make New Glenn 9×4 more powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket (64 tons to LEO), but less powerful than SpaceX’s Starship (100 to 150 tons to LEO).
The enhancements appear likely to up the ante in Blue Origin’s competition with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. New Glenn has been launched only twice, as opposed to hundreds of launches for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and scores of launches for ULA’s Atlas 5. But last week’s successful launch of twin probes to Mars and the first-ever recovery of an orbital-class New Glenn booster have raised Blue Origin’s profile in the launch industry.
That booster, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” flew itself back to a touchdown in the Atlantic Ocean atop Blue Origin’s recovery barge, which was named Jacklyn in honor of Jeff Bezos’ mother. This week the booster was brought back to port and transported to the company’s processing facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida, with Bezos looking on.
Yesterday, we welcomed Jacklyn and our fully reusable New Glenn first stage back to the Space Coast. Thank you, Team Blue. pic.twitter.com/WQyvFqn5Cd
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) November 19, 2025
One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a roadmap on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability.
These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website. The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.
The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage four BE-3U engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage.
© Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company.
Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same name), the company will focus on using AI to pursue breakthroughs in research, engineering, manufacturing, and other fields that are dubbed part of “the physical economy”—in contrast to the software applications that are likely the first thing most people in the general public think of when they hear “AI.”
Bezos’ co-CEO will be Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously led life sciences work at Google X, an Alphabet-backed research group that worked on speculative projects that could lead to more product categories. (For example, it developed technologies that would later underpin Google’s Waymo service.) Bajaj also worked at Verily, another Alphabet-backed research group focused on life sciences, and Foresite Labs, an incubator for new AI companies.
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
For decades—yes, literally decades—it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence.
But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn. It now seems clear that Blue Origin is in the midst of a transition from sleeping giant to force to be reckoned with.
To get a sense of where the company goes from here, Ars spoke with the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, on the eve of last week’s launch. The first thing he emphasized is how much the company learned about New Glenn, and the process of rolling the vehicle out and standing it up for launch, from the vehicle’s first attempt in January.
© Blue Origin
The first multi-spacecraft science mission to launch to Mars is now on its way, and catching a ride on the twin probes are the first kiwis to fly to the red planet.
NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission lifted off on a 22-month trip to Mars on Thursday aboard a New Glenn rocket. Once there, the identical satellites will enter Martian orbit to study in real time how space weather affects the planet’s hybrid magnetosphere and how the interaction drove Mars to lose its once-dense atmosphere.
Led by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley—the two spacecraft are named “Blue” and “Gold” after the school’s colors—the ESCAPADE probes are the first Mars-bound vehicles to be designed, built, and tested by Rocket Lab, the end-to-end space company headquartered in California but founded in New Zealand.
© UCB-SSL/Rocket Lab/collectSPACE.com
The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.
“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
© Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent twin orbiters on the first leg of their journey to Mars today, marking a successful sequel to January’s first liftoff of the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn launch vehicle.
The trouble-free launch of NASA’s Escapade probes, plus today’s first-ever recovery of a New Glenn booster, bolstered Blue Origin’s status as a worthy competitor for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has come to dominate the space industry. SpaceX is the only other company to bring back an orbital-class booster successfully.
Even Musk recognized the achievement: “Congratulations @JeffBezos and the @BlueOrigin team!” he wrote in a posting to X / Twitter, the social-media platform he owns.
New Glenn — which is named after John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit — rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT). Today’s liftoff followed attempts earlier this week that had to be scratched, initially due to cloudy weather on Earth, and then due to a solar storm in space.
Even on the day of launch, the countdown had to be held and recycled a couple of times for unspecified reasons. But in the end, liftoff was gloriously nominal.
Minutes after New Glenn rose into the sky, the mission plan called for the rocket’s first-stage booster to fly itself back to a touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic that was named Jacklyn after Bezos’ late mother. Blue Origin’s first attempt to recover a New Glenn booster failed in January — but this time, the maneuver was successful.
That achievement was greeted by wild cheers from Blue Origin team members watching the webcast, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control and a crowd at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The uncertainty about recovering the booster was reflected in the nickname it was given: “Never Tell Me the Odds.”
“Congratulations, Team Blue — you guys did it!” launch commentator Ariane Cornell, vice president of New Glenn strategy and business operations, said during the webcast. “What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry.”
Cornell’s co-host for the webcast, Tabitha Lipkin, was similarly enthused. “I think I hurt my hand on the table banging too much,” she said.
Meanwhile, New Glenn’s second stage pressed onward to orbit. A little more than half an hour after launch, the second stage deployed two robotic spacecraft for NASA’s Escapade mission to Mars. (The name for the $78.5 million mission is an acronym for “ESCApe and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers.”)
The twin probes will follow a loitering, looping trajectory that includes an Earth flyby a year from now. That slingshot maneuver should provide an extra boost to put the spacecraft into Martian orbit in 2027. Once the probes have settled into synchronized orbits, they’ll fly in formation to map the Red Planet’s magnetic field, upper atmosphere and ionosphere in stereo. The science mission is due to last until 2029.
Scientists say Escapade should help NASA prepare for future crewed missions to Mars.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” principal investigator Robert Lillis, a space physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a news release. Findings from Escapade could also help scientists work out ways to deal with the radiation risks associated with missions on Mars.
On the space science side of things, Escapade could shed light on the process by which Mars lost much of its atmosphere over the course of billions of years. “To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars,” Lillis said.
NASA put UC-Berkeley in charge of operating the probes, which have been named Blue and Gold in honor of Berkeley’s school colors. Rocket Lab USA built the spacecraft, and Blue Origin won the launch order in 2023, two years before New Glenn ever flew.
Escapade was originally scheduled for liftoff a year ago, but NASA postponed the start of the mission, citing the potential costs of a launch delay that “could be caused by a number of factors” — presumably including a scenario in which Blue Origin’s rocket wasn’t yet ready for liftoff. Additional delays arose as Blue Origin followed up on lessons learned from January’s first New Glenn launch.
In addition to launching the Escapade probes, New Glenn carried demonstration hardware for ViaSat’s HaloNet telemetry relay service. HaloNet was tested as part of a program aimed at switching space communication channels from NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system, or TDRS, to commercial satellites.
In a post-launch news release, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said “we achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team.”
“It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds had perfect odds — never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try,” Limp said. “This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
New Glenn is designed to send up to 45 metric tons of payload to low Earth orbit, and smaller payloads to destinations beyond Earth orbit. That makes the rocket more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket (23 metric tons to LEO), but less powerful than the Falcon Heavy (64 metric tons) or Starship (100 to 150 metric tons). Starship is still in development; a modified version of that rocket is currently due to carry NASA astronauts on the lunar surface in the 2027-2028 time frame.
Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, joined his boss in congratulating Blue Origin: “Recovering an orbital-class rocket is incredibly hard. Well done!” he wrote on X. “We as Americans should be very proud of what we are accomplishing in space.”
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy added his congratulations. “This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface,” Duffy said in a written statement. “Every launch of New Glenn provides data that will be essential when we launch MK-1 through Artemis. All of this information will be critical to protect future NASA explorers and invaluable as we evaluate how to deliver on President Trump’s vision of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.”
Sometime in the next few months, Blue Origin plans to use New Glenn to launch an uncrewed Blue Moon MK-1 lander to the moon’s south polar region. And thanks to today’s successful recovery at sea, there’s a chance that “Never Tell Me the Odds” could be reused as the first-stage booster for that launch.
Bezos and Limp both posted pictures and videos on social media with comments on the day’s achievements. Here are a few highlights:
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
Some fun stills! Congrats Team Blue and NASA on an amazing day. Never tell me the odds! pic.twitter.com/jUr31RoOgH
— Dave Limp (@davill) November 13, 2025
Another view pic.twitter.com/MqTIfurI4R
— Dave Limp (@davill) November 14, 2025
This report has been updated with comments from Musk, Bezos, Limp and Duffy.
What can Seattle learn about Amazon from Luxembourg?
At first glance, there aren’t many similarities between the Pacific Northwest tech hub and the small European nation, a financial powerhouse tucked between France and Germany. But we share a few things in common: a strong space sector, a taste for global innovation — and the outsized presence of Amazon in our local economies.
That last one made Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden’s visit to Seattle this week especially intriguing. Luxembourg is Amazon’s European headquarters, home to more than 4,250 employees, making the company the country’s second-largest private employer, and the fourth-largest overall.
Amazon’s workforce in Luxembourg spans Operations, Stores, Devices, and Amazon Web Services, including many of its European and international leaders. Illustrating its deep economic footprint in the country of 660,000 people, the tech giant says it invested more than €1.8 billion in Luxembourg in 2024 alone.
As part of a broader interview with GeekWire during his current West Coast tech tour, the prime minister explained how the country manages the relationship with the tech giant — describing Amazon as “a very good corporate citizen,” and explaining that he views the company as a “strategic partner.”
His comments stand in contrast to Amazon’s history in Seattle, where elected leaders have often wrestled with the impact of the company’s growth, and where the tech giant has at times threatened to slow hiring or relocate operations in response to proposed regulations.
“We consider Amazon almost to be a Luxembourg company,” Frieden said. “They use all the opportunities that we give to them, and that is my advice for other countries, as well. We are business friendly, we are open, we are stable, [and] we are predictable.”
That business-friendly approach isn’t new for Frieden. The 61-year-old prime minister, who was Luxembourg’s finance and justice minister before spending a decade in private legal practice, returned to lead the country in 2023 on a platform of maintaining Luxembourg’s competitiveness while strengthening its sovereignty.
Luxembourg is a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, and a founding member of the European Union. It’s known for a business-friendly tax environment that has attracted many international companies — making it one of the wealthiest and most connected nations in Europe.
Frieden’s trip was framed in Luxembourg media as a high-stakes working visit to “court leading AI firms” in Seattle and the Bay Area. As reported by RTL Today, the official purpose was to “strengthen economic, technological, and scientific partnerships” with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.
As part of his Pacific Northwest tour, Frieden visited companies including Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon and met with a variety of Seattle tech, business, and venture capital leaders. His visit came as businesses in the Seattle area and Washington state grapple with a slate of new state and local taxes, raising long-term questions about the region’s economic competitiveness.
GeekWire spoke with Frieden at a corner table inside Redmond’s Woodblock restaurant, where his motorcade prompted some passersby to ask if U.S. immigration forces had descended. Nope, just the prime minister of one of the world’s friendliest nations.
But we’re not the only ones curious about the Amazon relationship. Frieden was also questioned about it during an Oct. 7 appearance before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
Alex Agius Saliba, a Member of the European Parliament from Malta, asked in his public comments how Frieden could reconcile Luxembourg’s goals for digital sovereignty — ensuring critical data and digital services remain under national or European control — with the fact that Amazon, a U.S. corporation, is such a big employer and a key part of its tech and economic infrastructure.
The prime minister didn’t get a chance to address the question during his European Parliament appearance, so we put it to him in our interview. He rejected the idea of a conflict.
“No,” Frieden said, “because I think digital sovereignty does not mean that you cut yourself off from the rest of the world. It’s only about having some control over your data, and that is a legitimate goal, I think, for any government, for any region.”
Frieden, whose U.S. trip also includes a visit to Silicon Valley, cited Luxembourg’s partnership with Google as an example of how digital sovereignty can be maintained in collaboration with U.S. tech giants.
That initiative, called Clarence, is a joint venture between Luxembourg’s LuxConnect and Belgium’s Proximus that provides a sovereign cloud solution for sensitive workloads while using Google Cloud technology. Luxembourg’s financial regulator recently adopted the platform to develop AI applications with full data sovereignty, and Google has also partnered with the University of Luxembourg on research initiatives.
Beyond cloud infrastructure, Frieden addressed one of the most pressing tech policy challenges facing both Europe and the United States: artificial intelligence regulation.
On that front, he expressed concern about the U.S. government’s fragmented approach. Europe has its AI Act, while the U.S. has an emerging patchwork of federal initiatives and state laws.
“It’s the wrong approach, because AI is by nature global,” Frieden said, arguing that Europe and the U.S. need to get on the same page. “That is why I believe that we have to work with the U.S. as Europeans to make sure that the rules are more or less aligned.”
While he considers the EU’s AI Act a more comprehensive attempt to regulate AI, Frieden is among the European leaders pushing for simplification. “Like in many areas of European regulation, it is a little bit too complicated,” he said. “That’s why I am among those heads of state and government who have asked the Commission to simplify the rules.”
With tech companies pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, we asked if Frieden is concerned about the risk of a global AI bubble and its potential economic or environmental consequences.
Frieden said he focuses on the positive aspects and welcomes the investments. While acknowledging that AI’s environmental impact needs to be managed, he drew a comparison to aviation — another industry he engaged with during his visit to Boeing.
Just as the aviation industry works to reduce emissions rather than halting flights, he argued, AI’s side effects can be addressed while allowing the technology to flourish.
He compared the current AI revolution to past breakthroughs.
“Every few decades there’s a major evolution in mankind, and that evolution always comes due to technology,” he said, citing electricity and the internet as precedents. AI, he said, “will have a huge impact on the way we live together, we work together.”
The challenge for political leaders is choosing whether to “support the fear of the people, or whether they encourage people to embrace technological change.” Frieden places himself firmly in the latter camp: “Every technological innovation has brought positive changes to mankind.”
The prime minister’s visit also highlighted another Seattle-Luxembourg connection: space. Luxembourg has been a global leader in the field for decades, building on its 40-year history as a satellite hub for companies like SES and Intelsat.
The country established the SpaceResources.lu initiative for space mining and recently announced “Project Oasis,” a partnership with Kent-based Blue Origin — the commercial space venture founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — to map lunar resources.
Frieden emphasized that Luxembourg’s space, science, and technology initiatives are interconnected, not competing priorities. “We developed three strategies: an AI strategy, a data strategy and a quantum strategy,” he said. “Space is part of some of those strategies as well.”
One sign that Luxembourg’s approach might be working? We’ve heard anecdotally that when U.S. tech workers — especially from Amazon — are assigned to Luxembourg from Seattle or the Bay Area, they often don’t want to return.
The prime minister attributed this to Luxembourg’s high quality of life, including its safety, its diverse population — half the country’s residents are foreign nationals — and its proximity to major European cities like Paris and Amsterdam.
“It’s a very peaceful country,” Frieden said, noting that this combination of factors makes Luxembourg particularly attractive to international tech workers.
Until now, the aerospace outfit Blue Origin was little more than a plaything for Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. The company’s New Shepard rocket has launched a few space tourists, but its upcoming New Glenn vehicle will have a shot at something more important. NASA has awarded Blue Origin a contract to launch a Mars mission next year, marking the firm’s first interplanetary launch.
NASA has chosen Blue Origin to handle launch services for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, which is part of the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program. Blue Origin is one of 13 companies to get contracts under the program, designed to tolerate higher risk to allow for more innovation and lower overall costs.
Blue Origin has been developing New Glenn since 2012, announcing the vehicle in 2016, but it has yet to fly. When complete, New Glenn will be 322 feet (92 meters) tall with a diameter of 23 feet (9 meters). That’s larger in both dimensions than the Falcon 9 (70 x 3.7 meters). Like New Shepard, this rocket is designed to have a reusable first stage to reduce launch costs. It’s powered by seven BE-4 engines, a more powerful version of the oxygen and methane-fueled BE-3 used on New Shepard.
A render of what New Glenn may look like when finished.
The timeline is going to be tight — Blue Origin initially expected the first New Glenn launch to happen in 2020, but it has pushed it back several times. Currently, the rocket is slated to fly no earlier than Q4 of this year. NASA plans to launch the ESCAPADE about a year later, at the end of 2024. It’ll be up to Blue Origin to make sure its rocket is ready to go — projects in the VADR program call for less NASA oversight in order to save money.
Assuming Blue Origin comes through on its first interplanetary NASA contract, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will separate from the launch vehicle and spend 11 months coasting toward the red planet. Once there, the spacecraft will split into two identical orbiters, working together to analyze the planet’s magnetosphere. The mission will improve our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ weak magnetic field. That’s important information to have if we ever intend to send humans to Mars, for either a quick jaunt or long-term colonization. Although, either one is probably a long way off.
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