CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Blue Origin launched its massive New Glenn rocket on Thursday with a pair of NASA spacecraft bound for Mars.
This is only the second flight of the rocket that Jeff Bezos’ company and NASA are counting on to deliver people and supplies to the Moon — and it was a complete success.
The 321-foot (98-meter) New Glenn exploded into the afternoon sky from the Cape Canaveral space station, sending NASA’s twin Mars orbiters on a long journey to the Red Planet. Takeoff was delayed four days by gloomy local weather as well as solar storms strong enough to paint the sky with auroras as far as South Florida.
In a remarkable first, Blue Origin recovered the booster after it separated from the upper stage and Mars orbiters, a critical step for recycling and reducing costs similar to those of SpaceX. Company employees cheered wildly as the booster landed upright on a barge 375 miles (600 kilometers) offshore. An ecstatic Bezos watched the action from Launch Control.
“Next stop, moon!” » » chanted the employees after landing in the center of the booster. Twenty minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage deployed the two Mars orbiters into space, the main objective of the mission. Congratulations poured in from NASA officials as well as SpaceX’s Elon Musk, whose booster landings are now commonplace.
New Glenn’s inaugural test flight in January put a prototype satellite into orbit, but failed to land the booster on its floating platform in the Atlantic.
The identical Mars orbiters, named Escapade, will spend a year near Earth, parking 1.5 million kilometers away. Once Earth and Mars are properly aligned next fall, the duo will receive a gravitational assist from Earth to head towards the Red Planet, arriving in 2027.
Once around Mars, the spacecraft will map the planet’s upper atmosphere and scattered magnetic fields, studying how these areas interact with the solar wind. The observations should shed light on the processes behind the escape of the Martian atmosphere, helping to explain how the planet went from wet and hot to dry and dusty. Scientists will also learn how to best protect astronauts from Mars’ harsh radiological environment.
“We really, really want to better understand the interaction of the solar wind with Mars,” Escapade principal scientist Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, said before the launch. “Escapade is going to bring an unprecedented stereo viewpoint because we’re going to have two spacecraft at the same time.”
This is a relatively low-budget mission, less than $80 million, managed and operated by UC Berkeley. NASA saved money by signing up for one of New Glenn’s first flights. The Mars orbiters should have lifted off last fall, but NASA missed that ideal launch window — Earth and Mars align for a rapid transit only every two years — due to feared delays with Blue Origin’s newest rocket.
Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the world, New Glenn is five times larger than the New Shepard rockets that send wealthy clients to the far reaches of space from West Texas. Blue Origin plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lunar lander on a demonstration mission in the coming months aboard New Glenn.
Created in 2000 by Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Blue Origin already holds a NASA contract for the third moon landing of astronauts as part of the Artemis program. Musk’s SpaceX beat Blue Origin for the first and second crew landings, using spacecraft nearly 100 feet (30 meters) longer than Bezos’ New Glenn.
But last month, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy reopened the contract for the first crewed moon landing, citing concerns about the pace of Starship’s progress during flight tests from Texas. Blue Origin as well as SpaceX have presented accelerated landing plans.
NASA is set to send astronauts around the Moon early next year using its own Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket. The next Artemis crew would attempt to land; the space agency is pushing for astronauts to return to the lunar surface by the end of the decade in order to defeat China.
Twelve astronauts walked on the Moon more than half a century ago during NASA’s Apollo program.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
