ESCAPADE launch on New Glenn deliberate for late October or early November

WASHINGTON — The second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, carrying a NASA smallsat mission to Mars, is now anticipated in late October or early November.

The launch of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, mission was scheduled for no sooner than Sept. 29 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in accordance with a Blue Origin social media update final month. A launch on that date appeared more and more unlikely given the state of each spacecraft and launch automobile preparations.

Speaking on the finish of a NASA webcast for the Sept. 24 launch of three area science missions on a SpaceX Falcon 9, Tim Dunn, senior launch director in NASA’s Launch Services Program, mentioned ESCAPADE is now anticipated to launch close to the top of October or the primary week of November. His program procured the launch by means of the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare, or VADR, contract automobile.

“We believe we’re targeting very late in October, maybe the first week in November, for ESCAPADE to launch on a New Glenn rocket,” he mentioned.

His feedback got here two days after NASA and Rocket Lab, the spacecraft producer, introduced that the dual smallsats had returned to Florida for payload processing. At the time, each the company and the corporate mentioned the launch was scheduled for no sooner than this fall.

The ESCAPADE spacecraft, nicknamed Blue and Gold, had been initially shipped from Rocket Lab’s Long Beach, California, manufacturing unit to Florida in August 2024 for a launch then scheduled for October of that yr. However, NASA halted preparations in early September when it decided New Glenn wouldn’t be prepared in time for a launch window that closed in late October.

The spacecraft returned to Long Beach to await a brand new launch date. Rocket Lab famous in a Sept. 12 social media post that the spacecraft had been finishing assessments forward of returning to Florida. Three days later, on the World Space Business Week convention in Paris, Laura Maginnis, vp of New Glenn mission administration at Blue Origin, mentioned the launch would happen “in the coming weeks” however was no more particular.

The upcoming mission would be the second launch of New Glenn, following the automobile’s inaugural flight in January. That launch, carrying a tech demo payload that remained connected to the higher stage, efficiently reached orbit, though the booster was misplaced throughout an tried touchdown on a downrange ship.

Blue Origin had deliberate to conduct the second launch of New Glenn as early as this spring, and a yr in the past outlined plans to carry out 8 to 10 launches in 2025. Maginnis mentioned on the Paris convention that Blue Origin was constructing out a fleet of a number of boosters and had eight higher levels in storage, promising to launch “multiple times per month” in 2026.

ESCAPADE doesn’t face the slender launch home windows typical of different Mars missions. A crew at Advanced Space, an organization supporting the mission, developed a number of trajectories the place ESCAPADE might loiter in Earth orbit or across the Earth-sun L2 Lagrange level earlier than heading to Mars in 2026.

That strategy permits ESCAPADE to launch “virtually any day” this yr, mentioned Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space in a presentation on the Small Satellite Conference in August.

“It’s been a long road, but we are so excited to be launching Blue & Gold on their mission to understand the Martian space weather environment,” Rob Lillis, principal investigator for ESCAPADE on the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, mentioned in a Rocket Lab assertion in regards to the arrival of the spacecraft on the launch web site.

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