Blue Origin, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company, joined a very small club on Thursday when it completed its first reusable rocket booster reentry and landing.

The launch, which was Blue Origin’s first for a paying customer, sent two satellites into space for NASA. Those satellites are headed toward Mars to study the impacts of solar wind on the Red Planet, among other things.

The New Glenn rocket booster then reentered the atmosphere and successfully touched down on a floating landing pad.

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— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 13, 2025

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

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— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 13, 2025

Acting NASA Admin Sean Duffy said of the launch: “Congratulations to Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, UC Berkeley, and all our partners on the successful launch of ESCAPADE. This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface. Every launch of New Glenn provides data that will be essential when we launch MK-1 through Artemis. All 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.”

Blue Origin’s successful reentry and landing puts the company on more equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which pioneered reusable rocket technology and had its first successful reentry and landing in 2015.

Since then, SpaceX has landed and recovered many boosters, and has caught three with the “chopsticks,” a pair of giant mechanical arms.

In 2023, Blue Origin won a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop the “human landing system” for the space agency’s Artemis V mission.

“Blue Origin will design, develop, test, and verify its Blue Moon lander to meet NASA’s human landing system requirements for recurring astronaut expeditions to the lunar surface, including docking with Gateway, a space station where crew transfer in lunar orbit,” NASA said in a press release.

Author Barry Levine claimed on Saturday that he believed the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to President Donald Trump were rooted in animosity rather than in any shared illegal activities.

Levine, author of “The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell,” spoke with CNN host Michael Smerconish about the recently released emails — held up by Democrats as proof the Trump and Epstein were cut from the same cloth — which he said did not necessarily mean what Trump’s critics claim they did.

WATCH:

🚨NEW: Epstein Book Author Barry Levine tells CNN what he thinks Epstein meant in 2011 email about TRUMP🚨

SMERCONISH: “The ‘dog that hasn’t barked is trump.’ What do you think he’s referring to?”

LEVINE: “I think Jeffrey Epstein is referring to the fact that he believes that… pic.twitter.com/aCRhvzBjX3

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) November 15, 2025

“The ‘dog that hasn’t barked is trump.’ What do you think he’s referring to?” Smerconish referenced an email Epstein sent in 2011.

“I think Jeffrey Epstein is referring to the fact that he believes that Donald Trump talked to Michael Ryder, who was the Palm Beach police chief in 2004 and began the first investigation into Jeffrey Epstein,” Levine said. That investigation began in earnest in 2005, and Trump officially banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007.

“I suspect that Jeffrey Epstein was saying he was ‘75% there,’ believing that Trump might have been the whistleblower at the time,” Levine continued. “That particular year, the 2 men had a falling out — not only over the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell was taking young women from his spa at Mar-a-Lago for Jeffrey Epstein — but they also had a nasty real estate deal that both men were trying to get … So there was bad blood between the two of them.”

Levine seems an unlikely figure to defend President Trump, however, as his statements come against the backdrop of another book he wrote in 2019 — “All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator” — in which he delved into the accusations of sexual misconduct made against Trump. It should noted that those accusations, described in detail in the book, involved women who were not underage at the time they supposedly interacted with Trump.