Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent twin orbiters on the first leg of their journey to Mars today, marking a successful sequel to January’s first liftoff of the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn launch vehicle.
The trouble-free launch of NASA’s Escapade probes, plus today’s first-ever recovery of a New Glenn booster, bolstered Blue Origin’s status as a worthy competitor for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has come to dominate the space industry. SpaceX is the only other company to bring back an orbital-class booster successfully.
New Glenn — which is named after John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit — rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT). Today’s liftoff followed attempts earlier this week that had to be scratched, initially due to cloudy weather on Earth, and then due to a solar storm in space.
Minutes after New Glenn rose into the sky, the mission plan called for the rocket’s first-stage booster to fly itself back to a touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic that was named Jacklyn after Bezos’ late mother. Blue Origin’s first attempt to recover a New Glenn booster failed in January — but this time, the maneuver was successful.
That achievement was greeted by wild cheers from Blue Origin team members watching the webcast, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control and a crowd at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The uncertainty about recovering the booster was reflected in the nickname it was given: “Never Tell Me the Odds.”
“Congratulations, Team Blue — you guys did it!” launch commentator Ariane Cornell, vice president of New Glenn strategy and business operations, said during the webcast. “What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry.”
Cornell’s co-host for the webcast, Tabitha Lipkin, was similarly enthused. “I think I hurt my hand on the table banging too much,” she said.
Meanwhile, New Glenn’s second stage pressed onward to orbit. A little more than half an hour after launch, the second stage deployed two robotic spacecraft for NASA’s Escapade mission to Mars. (The name for the $78.5 million mission is an acronym for “ESCApe and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers.”)
The twin probes will follow a loitering, looping trajectory that includes an Earth flyby a year from now. That slingshot maneuver should provide an extra boost to put the spacecraft into Martian orbit in 2027. Once the probes have settled into synchronized orbits, they’ll fly in formation to map the Red Planet’s magnetic field, upper atmosphere and ionosphere in stereo. The science mission is due to last until 2029.
Scientists say Escapade should help NASA prepare for future crewed missions to Mars.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” principal investigator Robert Lillis, a space physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a news release. Findings from Escapade could also help scientists work out ways to deal with the radiation risks associated with missions on Mars.
On the space science side of things, Escapade could shed light on the process by which Mars lost much of its atmosphere over the course of billions of years. “To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars,” Lillis said.
NASA put UC-Berkeley in charge of operating the probes, which have been named Blue and Gold in honor of Berkeley’s school colors. Rocket Lab USA built the spacecraft, and Blue Origin won the launch order in 2023, two years before New Glenn ever flew.
Escapade was originally scheduled for liftoff a year ago, but NASA postponed the start of the mission, citing the potential costs of a launch delay that “could be caused by a number of factors” — presumably including a scenario in which Blue Origin’s rocket wasn’t yet ready for liftoff. Additional delays arose as Blue Origin followed up on lessons learned from January’s first New Glenn launch.
In addition to launching the Escapade probes, New Glenn carried demonstration hardware for ViaSat’s HaloNet telemetry relay service. HaloNet is being tested as part of a program aimed at switching space communication channels from NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system, or TDRS, to commercial satellites.
New Glenn is designed to send up to 45 metric tons of payload to low Earth orbit, and smaller payloads to destinations beyond Earth orbit. That makes the rocket more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket (23 metric tons to LEO), but less powerful than the Falcon Heavy (64 metric tons) or Starship (100 to 150 metric tons). Starship is still in development, but a modified version of that rocket is currently due to carry NASA astronauts on the lunar surface in the 2027-2028 time frame.
Sometime in the next few months, Blue Origin plans to use New Glenn to launch an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the moon’s south polar region. And thanks to today’s successful recovery at sea, the company plans to double-down by reusing “Never Tell Me the Odds” as the first-stage booster for that launch.
