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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket simply launched an interplanetary mission on its second-ever flight — and aced an epic touchdown at sea.
“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, advised reporters throughout a press briefing on Saturday (Nov. 8).
Related: 5 reasons why Blue Origin’s New Glenn Mars launch was a big deal
ESCAPADE — short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — is a first-of-its-kind mission to send two commercially built probes that will study how Mars, which once had liquid water on its surface, lost its atmosphere over time to become the arid Red Planet we know today. Built by Rocket Lab for NASA and UC Berkeley, the mission costs less than $80 million — much less than the agency’s flagship Mars missions in the past.
Blue Origin launched ESCAPADE from its Launch Complex 36 pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The flight continued as planned, with main engine cutoff and stage separation occurring about three minutes after liftoff.
The rocket’s second stage continued onward to deliver ESCAPADE into space, while New Glenn’s first stage began a series of deceleration burns to attempt a landing on Blue Origin’s recovery ship “Jacklyn,” which was waiting about 375 miles (604 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
Blue Origin tried for a similar landing during the first New Glenn launch in January of this year but was unsuccessful. At the time, Blue Origin didn’t expect to ace the landing but instead hoped to gather data to boost the chances of success on future flights. And that strategy paid off today.
About seven minutes into flight, as the New Glenn booster fell through Earth’s atmosphere, the rocket relit three of its seven BE-4 engines. Two minutes after that, the booster performed a propulsive touchdown, landing vertically on Jacklyn, which was named after company founder Jeff Bezos‘ mom.
“A landed orbital rocket!” Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell said during the company’s launch webcast today. “What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry.”
Blue Origin is now the second company in history to recover a rocket during an operational flight. This practice has become the norm for SpaceX, which has so mastered landing and reusing its Falcon 9 rocket that boosters launching for the first time are now a rarity.
The landing wasn’t the main goal of today’s mission, of course; that would be sending the ESCAPADE probes successfully on their way. And that indeed happened: The duo deployed on schedule over a 30-second span beginning about 33.5 minutes after liftoff.
“ESCAPADE, you are headed to Mars!” Cornell said after the second spacecraft separated from New Glenn’s upper stage.
Capable of carrying up to 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO), New Glenn is comparable to, but not quite as powerful as, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, and has nearly twice the lifting capacity as United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur. Blue Origin intends to position the 321-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn to take on some of the Falcon 9’s current share of the launch market.
The company has designed New Glenn’s first-stage boosters to be capable of at least 25 flights each, and already has a manifest of missions for customers ranging from the U.S. government to communications companies. Blue Origin has also partnered with another Bezos company, Amazon, to help launch the Project Kuiper satellite-internet megaconstellation, which will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network. Amazon currently has a license to launch over 3,000 Kuiper internet satellites, which will fly on a variety of different rockets.
The success of today’s flight also puts New Glenn one step closer toward qualification to fly lucrative national security payload contracts for the U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.
In addition to ESCAPADE, New Glenn carried a secondary payload for customer ViaSat to test that company’s InRange launch telemetry relay service as part of a project for NASA’s Communications Services Project (CSP). The technology could be used in a successor system for NASA’s aging Telemetry and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system.
“We are excited to be working with Blue Origin as our launch partner to showcase our innovative launch telemetry services,” Susan Miller, president of Viasat Government, said in a statement. “As NASA appears to be like forward to changing the TDRS system, industrial capabilities must ship higher efficiency, flexibility and resilience to assist future missions.”
A Mars mission like no different
ESCAPADE is the primary Mars mission to launch in additional than 5 years. The most up-to-date one, NASA’s Perseverance rover (and ride-along Ingenuity helicopter) lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in July 2020.
NASA officials, however, were unable to participate in prelaunch media events for ESCAPADE because of the just-ended government shutdown, which was the longest in U.S. history at more than 40 days. Blue Origin was particularly hopeful for an on-time launch Sunday (Nov. 9) after the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday (Nov. 7) announced a halt to daytime commercial rocket launches to reduce strain and safety risks for air traffic controllers. That halt began on Nov. 10, the first of two planned backup launch days for ESCAPADE
A Sunday launch wasn’t in the cards; bad weather forced a scrub that day, and Blue Origin targeted Wednesday — the same day the shutdown ended — after getting a waiver from the FAA for a daytime launch. Wednesday’s try was thwarted by a powerful solar storm, however, so the company recalibrated for another try today.
Those were just the latest delays. New Glenn was initially scheduled to launch ESCAPADE on its debut mission (then scheduled for October 2024), but NASA decided to delay liftoff until the rocket had at least one successful launch under its belt in order to avoid potentially significant cost overruns in the event of a long delay. That delay added up to $7 million to the mission’s overall cost for the university, Dave Curtis, ESCAPADE project manager at Berkeley, said on Saturday.
Now, just over a year after that launch delay decision, the twin Mars orbiters are headed to their destination — sort of.
New Glenn launched the orbiter duo toward the Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, an area of gravitational stability about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. ESCAPADE will stay there for a year before looping back for a close pass of Earth in November 2026, at which point it will fire up its engines for a slingshot toward Mars — a novel trajectory that allowed the mission to launch outside the typical Earth-Mars transfer window, which opens just once every 26 months. (The next such opening comes in late 2026.)
“We build a high delta V system that not only cruises to Mars and performs the Mars orbit insertion maneuver, but first climbs out of the Earth’s gravity well, eliminating the need for Mars direct transfer from the launch vehicle, significantly increasing the available launch options,” Richard French, Rocket Lab’s vice president of business development and strategy, told reporters on Saturday.
Where did Mars’ atmosphere go?
If all goes well, ESCAPADE will leave its Lagrange point 2 loiter spot in November 2026 and arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in September 2027. Once there, mission leads at the University of California, Berkeley will operate the orbiters, dubbed Blue and Gold (for the university’s colors), for about 11 months.
The probes will collect data with four different science instruments (which are identical on both of them). The science team will use this information to construct a 3D map of the environment around Mars to study how the solar wind contributes to the depletion of Mars’ atmosphere, among other tasks.
“The geological evidence shows that Mars once had water on it, and in order to keep the water, you need a thick atmosphere,” ESCAPADE Deputy Principal Investigator Shaosui Xu, a space physicist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, said in a statement.
“So we all know that there was a thick sufficient ambiance on Mars as soon as upon a time, however now it is extremely tenuous,” Xu added. “There are solely two methods for ambiance to go away — both go into the bottom or escape to area, and there are loads of research displaying that escape has been a really important contributor to the evolution of the ambiance.”
Lillis said the misson team is particularly excited because ESCAPADE will study Mars in tandem with other spacecraft already at the Red Planet. NASA’s MAVEN orbiter has been closely studying the planet’s atmosphere since its arrival there in 2014. Other spacecraft at Mars include NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and two European orbiters — Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. And Japan’s planned Mars Moons Explorer mission will track the solar wind at the Martian moon Phobos, giving yet another eye on space weather at the Red Planet.
“This is a very thrilling time the place we’ll have all these belongings at Mars,” Lillis stated.
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