New Glenn booster returns to Port Canaveral as Florida’s space week spans Moon crew and Mars finds

Blue Origin’s landing ship Jacklyn returned to Port Canaveral on Wednesday afternoon with a New Glenn first-stage booster aboard — a sight that signaled a second successful sea recovery for the company’s orbital rocket. This was not the usual SpaceX Falcon 9 making port, but New Glenn, which Blue Origin last November became the second company to land on a barge at sea.

The company duplicated that feat on April 19 after launching its third New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral. The booster, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” flew a second time and landed again. Skywatchers across the United States looked up this week as the Lyrids meteor shower reached its 2026 peak.

Only a few had the vantage point of 250 miles above Earth, and one NASA astronaut captured images of the shower from the International Space Station’s cupola. The cosmic perspective dovetailed with Earth Day 2026, when astronauts and spacecraft once again offered striking views of the planet — a reminder that even as missions head outward, they often look back toward the “little blue planet” below.

On Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover reported its most diverse collection of organic molecules yet. A study published Tuesday in Nature Communications details 21 carbon-containing compounds identified from a rock sample Curiosity drilled and analyzed in 2020. Seven of those molecules were detected on the Red Planet for the first time.

Back home, the Artemis II astronauts have kept busy for nearly two weeks since returning to Earth from a 10-day mission that began April 1 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and ended April 10 off the coast of San Diego, California. The flight became the first space mission to send humans near the vicinity of the Moon in more than 50 years.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them while taking in unprecedented sights of the Moon. It was also an end of an era for SpaceX operations at Port Canaveral.

The drone ship Just Read the Instructions arrived early Thursday, April 23, carrying the Falcon 9 first stage from the April 21 GPS III mission. According to SpaceX, this was the last time that specific drone ship will carry a Falcon 9 booster; it will now prepare to support Starship operations.

Beyond launches and landings, NASA’s Langley Research Center and the United Network for Organ Sharing announced a partnership to explore whether advanced aviation technologies — including drones — can speed the transport of donor organs, according to a community announcement.

And at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, an archaeological test pit revealed the spinal column of a large shark consumed by Native Americans — part of an Indigenous refuse site laden with shells, pottery fragments and animal bones. The find, roughly 200 feet from the Banana River shoreline within the DeSoto Grove archaeological zone, underscores the Cape’s history long before rockets.

From new sea landings and Moon flybys to Mars chemistry and future medical logistics, the week’s developments point to a Space Coast in motion — with SpaceX retooling assets for Starship and partnerships testing how aerospace technology can deliver on Earth as well as in space.