Blue Origin successfully launched its huge New Glenn rocket on Thursday with a pair of Nasa spacecraft destined for Mars. It was only the second flight of the rocket that Jeff Bezos’s company and Nasa are counting on to ferry people and supplies to the moon.
The 321ft (98-meter) New Glenn blasted into the afternoon sky from the Cape Canaveral space force station, sending Nasa’s twin Mars orbiters on a long journey to the red planet. Liftoff was stalled for four days by inclement local weather as well as solar storms strong enough to paint the skies with auroras as far south as Florida.
In a first for the fledgling company, Blue Origin recovered the booster following its separation from the upper stage and the Mars orbiters, an essential step to recycle and slash costs similar to how SpaceX rockets work. Company employees cheered wildly as the booster landed upright on a barge 375 miles (600km) offshore. An ecstatic Bezos watched the action from launch control.
“Next stop, moon!” employees chanted following the booster’s bull’s-eye landing. Twenty minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage deployed the two Mars orbiters in space, the mission’s main objective.
The New Glenn’s inaugural test flight in January delivered a prototype satellite to orbit, but failed to land the booster on its floating platform in the Atlantic.
The identical Mars orbiters, named Escapade, will spend a year hanging out near Earth, stationing themselves 1m miles (1.5m kilometers) away. Once Earth and Mars are properly aligned next fall, the duo will get a gravity assist from Earth to head to 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 realms interact with the solar wind. The observations should shed light on the processes behind the escaping Martian atmosphere, helping to explain how the planet went from wet and warm to dry and dusty. Scientists will also study how best to protect astronauts against Mars’s harsh radiation environment.
“We really, really want to understand the interaction of the solar wind with Mars better than we do now,” Escapade’s lead scientist, Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, said ahead of the launch. “Escapade is going to bring an unprecedented stereo viewpoint because we’re going to have two spacecraft at the same time.”
The relatively low-budget mission, coming in under $80m, is managed and operated by UC Berkeley. The Mars orbiters should have blasted off last fall, but Nasa passed up that ideal launch window – Earth and Mars line up for a quick transit just every two years – because of feared delays with Blue Origin’s brand-new rocket.
Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the world, the New Glenn is five times bigger than Blue Origin’s New Shepard rockets that send wealthy clients to the edge of space from west Texas. Blue Origin plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lunar lander on a demo mission in the coming months onboard the New Glenn.
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Created in 2000 by Bezos, Amazon’s founder, Blue Origin already holds a Nasa contract for the third moon landing by astronauts under the Artemis program. Elon Musk’s SpaceX beat out Blue Origin for the first and second crew landings, using its Starship rocket, nearly 100ft (30 meters) taller than Bezos’ New Glenn.
But last month, Nasa’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, reopened the contract for the first crewed moon landing, citing concern over the pace of the Starship’s progress in flight tests from Texas. Blue Origin as well as SpaceX have presented accelerated landing plans.
Nasa is on track 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 pressing to get astronauts back on the lunar surface by decade’s end in order to surpass a Chinese mission to do the same.
