Mars payload en route to Florida for first launch of Blue Origin New Glenn

The two Mars spacecraft of NASA’s ESCAPADE mission were packed in California and shipped to Florida this week, ahead of the first-ever launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral.

ESCAPADE stands for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. The mission’s goal is to orbit Mars and observe plasma and magnetic fields around the planet to understand what processes release atoms from Mars’ magnetosphere and upper atmosphere. This could help explain why Mars’ atmosphere is so thin and how it might have evolved over time.

The two small satellites, named Blue and Gold, were built by the Rocket Lab in California for NASA and the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

They will soon arrive at Kennedy Space Center, where they will be taken to a clean room where they will be inspected and tested after transport. Finally, they will be encapsulated for launch on New Glenn from Blue Origin’s launch pad at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which Blue Origin officials say will happen before the end of the year.

Rocket Lab is best known for its small launch vehicle activities, and in recent years it has become the second most active launcher to SpaceX, mostly from New Zealand, where its founder and CEO Peter Beck is from. Rocket Lab notably successfully launched the CAPSTONE mission for NASA to prove that future spacecraft like the Orion capsules of the Artemis mission could achieve a unique orbit around the Moon.

“We’ve already been to the Moon for NASA and are excited to build on that and send Rocket Lab technology deeper into the solar system, this time to the Red Planet,” Beck said in a press release. “Our Space Systems team has built a beautiful and extremely capable pair of spacecraft to help NASA and the University of California Berkeley expand humanity’s understanding of Mars.”

In 2021, the company was awarded a contract under NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, along with the Science Mission Directorate, to build the two satellites that will utilize the company’s Photon spacecraft. After launch, the two satellites will embark on an 11-month journey to Mars and will enter elliptical orbits for the year-long planetary exploration mission.

Rocket Lab conducted assembly, integration and testing at its Spacecraft Production Complex and headquarters in Long Beach, California.

Rob Lillis, ESCAPADE’s principal investigator and deputy director for planetary science at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, praised Rocket Lab’s efforts over the past three years to keep the mission on schedule for launch.

“The successful delivery of the spacecraft to Kennedy Space Center is a significant milestone and the culmination of over three years of dedicated teamwork by individuals across all areas of the project, particularly our partners at Rocket Lab,” he said. “Interplanetary spacecraft must be much more resilient than Earth satellites, and developing not just one but two of these probes almost from scratch was no small feat.”

To get to Mars, however, Jeff Bezos’ new heavy-lift rocket will have to work on the first try after NASA awarded Blue Origin the $20 million launch contract. The launch window begins in September and runs through October, with the ESCAPADE website listing September 29 as a placeholder launch date.

NASA is also relying on Blue Origin and New Glenn for Blue Moon, one of the two lunar landing systems in the Artemis program.

And Blue Origin has an extensive list of commercial customers, including several flights for Bezos’ Amazon and its Project Kuiper satellites.

Construction of the rockets continues at Blue Origin’s factory next to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center on Merritt Island, and teams recently tested recovery operations for the return of the first-stage boosters after launch at Port Canaveral.

The company has facilities at Cape Canaveral large enough to handle three New Glenn rockets simultaneously. Blue Origin took over the lease for LC-36 in 2015 and invested around a billion dollars in the launch pad alone. It was already used for government launches from 1962 to 2005, including the Surveyor 1 lunar module in 1967 and some of the Mariner probes.

When launches eventually occur, the booster’s first stage will land about 620 miles down in the Atlantic Ocean on a landing pad similar to the launch and landing pad used by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets. After landing, they will return to Port Canaveral to be unloaded and reused. The boosters are designed to last for up to 25 flights.

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