NASA has picked Blue Origin’s New Glenn, the company’s heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle that has yet to go on its first launch, for a science mission to Mars. As Reuters notes, it’s also the first interplanetary NASA contract of the organization. The mission is known as scape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers or ESCAPADE.
It was planned especially for studying the magnetosphere of the planet executing twin spacecraft. NASA is targeting a late 2024 launch for the mission, which means we would not have to anticipate too long to finally see the New Glenn in action — if the owned space corp of Jeff-Bezos can prevent further development delays, that is.
The New Glenn vehicle is the reply of the organization to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and other heavy-lift vehicles of the organization. Blue Origin initially hit a 2020 date for its first release — and NASA accepted it for the future:
- unmanned scientific
- exploration missions that year
however, the event kept getting forced back. It proceeded to 2021 and then to 2022. By the end of March in the previous year, Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s SVP for New Glenn, confessed that the vehicle wasn’t about to fly for the first time in the year 2022 and that the organization was in the process of setting a new date.
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NASA has made a plan to give Blue Origin the contract for ESCAPADE and given it under the program named as Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR), which was built up to promote the growth of commercial launch services in the United States.
The agency aspires to employ launch vehicles from program participants particularly for “small satellites and Class D payloads” that can endure higher risk potential. In other words, VADR contracts are built-up, especially for lower-cost missions. “By executing a lower level of mission assurance and commercial best practices for releasing rockets, these highly ductile contracts assist in broadening access to space via lower launch costs,” NASA claimed in its declaration of New Glenn’s selection.
The ESCAPADE mission would launch from Space Launch Complex-36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It will take about 11 months for the mission to reach the red planet. After that, it will barely take a few more months for the twin spacecraft to reach the orbit ideal for collecting details about the Martian magnetosphere. The data it will provide can assist in giving scientists a better understanding of space weather, so that safeguards could be put in place to better secure:
- Astronauts
- Satellites in our dedicated exploration of outer space.
