Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket just launched an interplanetary mission on its second-ever flight — and aced an epic landing at sea.

NASA's two-spacecraft ESCAPADE Mars mission is now en route to the Red Planet, thanks to a successful liftoff today (Nov. 13) of New Glenn, Blue Origin's next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle. The countdown clock hit zero at 3:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT) this afternoon, as the rocket began rising off its Blue Origin pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on Florida's Space Coast.

"I think ESCAPADE is really exciting because it's a trailblazer, a pathfinder if you will, for what we think is a new way of doing space science missions," ESCAPADE Principal Investigator Robert Lillis, of the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, told r

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