Blue Origin has successfully reused one of its new Glenn rockets for the first time, marking a major milestone for the heavy launch system as Jeff Bezos’ space company looks to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The company accomplished the feat Sunday on just the third launch of New Glenn, and a little more than a year after the first flight of the new rocket system, which has been in development for more than a decade.

Making New Glenn reusable is critical to New Glenn’s economics. SpaceX’s ability to refly Falcon 9 rocket boosters is one of the main reasons it dominates the global orbital launch market.

While Blue Origin has already sent commercial payloads into space with New Glenn — Sunday’s second such mission — the company wants to use the rocket for NASA’s moon missions, and to help both it and Amazon build space-based satellite networks. Blue Origin is currently preparing its first robotic lunar lander for a launch attempt later this year.

The booster that Blue Origin flew again on Sunday was the same one the company used on the second New Glen mission in November. During this mission, the New Glenn booster helped put two robotic NASA spacecraft into space for the Mars mission, before returning to the drone ship at sea. On Sunday, Blue Origin recovered the rocket booster aboard the drone for the second time, about 10 minutes after takeoff.

Sunday’s primary mission was to launch a communications satellite into space for customer AST SpaceMobile. The New Glenn upper stage was still carrying the satellite into its designated orbit when this story was published, and TechCrunch will update this post as the mission progresses.