There are currently plans for NASA to send a science mission to Mars on a New Glenn rocket – the company’s first big government contract for a launch vehicle that is as-yet untested.
Essentially, New Glenn is the much, much larger brother of the suborbital New Shepard rocket that so many celebrities and the rich have been able to travel to the edge of space in. In 2016, SpaceX announced a launch vehicle that would compete with its Falcon Heavy, as well as other heavy-lift options on the market. In spite of that, 6 years later, we still have yet to see a functioning New Glenn on the ground, let alone one that is ready to launch a Mars mission.
There was originally a schedule for the first flight to take place in late 2021, but that date was “refined” earlier that year, reportedly due to the collapse of a contract with the Pentagon. Q4 of 2022 was the next window, but obviously that’s come and gone. I’ve asked for updated timing.
The launch contract is through the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program at NASA, which early last year assigned a maximum of $300 million to be split among 13 companies for launch services of various kinds. Everyone who’s anyone is on the list there, essentially providing a low-cost option for noncritical missions.
“These small satellites and Class D payloads tolerate relatively high risk and serve as an ideal platform for technical and architecture innovation,” wrote NASA at the time of the award. In other words, we’d certainly rather they didn’t blow up, but at this price who’s arguing?
The lucky mission to be awarded a spot on a New Glenn is Escapade, a dual-craft Martian magnetosphere study that, funnily enough, is being designed and built by launch rival Rocket Lab. (They don’t really overlap yet, in fact, but they are nominally competitors.)
In theory, the spacecraft will launch in 2024, but that date often slips, especially when the rocket they’re going up on is still just a theory at this point.
READ MORE: $3M donated by Samsung for Turkey earthquake relief
However, Rocket Lab is not angry with the company. According to TechCrunch, due to the size of ESCAPADE and its mission requirements, the mission is not suitable for launch on Electron owing to its size and mission requirements.
As a refresher of the mission, let me tell you a little more: “The pair of Photons will conduct an 11-month interplanetary cruise before inserting themselves in elliptical orbits around Mars to study the structure, composition, variability, and dynamics of Mars’ unique hybrid magnetosphere – which is crucial to improving solar storm prediction in crewed exploration programs such as Artemis.”
Though New Glenn may not be flying just yet, there is plenty of interest in it, most notably from Amazon’s company Kuiper, which has built a constellation of communication satellites with Blue Origin. It is expected that Blue will continue to operate its new Huntsville facility at least until the end of the year, as they ordered 12 last year.
