NASA and Blue Origin announced Friday that they have agreed to delay the launch of the ESCAPADE mission to Mars until at least the spring of 2025.<\/p>\n
The decision to stand down from a launch attempt in mid-October was driven by a deadline to begin loading hypergolic propellant on the two small ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft. While it is theoretically possible to offload fuel from these vehicles for a future launch attempt, multiple sources told Ars that such an activity would incur significant risk to the spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Forced to make a call on whether to fuel, NASA decided not to. Although the two spacecraft were otherwise ready for launch, it was not clear the New Glenn rocket would be similarly ready to go.<\/p>\n
NASA procured the debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, which was developed by Blue Origin, for a significant discount. The mission\u2019s managers, University of California, Berkeley\u2019s Space Sciences Laboratory, always understood there were timeline risks with launching on New Glenn.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin appears to have worked with some urgency this year to prepare the massive rocket for its initial launch. However, when the company missed a key target of hot firing the rocket\u2019s upper stage by the end of August, NASA delayed fueling of the ESCAPADE mission. Now, with the closing of a Mars launch window next month, NASA will not fuel the spacecraft until next spring, at the earliest.<\/p>\n
Founded by Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin successfully rolled the New Glenn second stage to its launch pad at Launch Complex-36 in Florida on Tuesday. The company is now targeting Monday, September 9, for a hot fire test of the second stage.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
At the same time, preparations for the rocket\u2019s first stage are nearing completion. All seven of the rocket\u2019s BE-4 engines have arrived at the launch site following acceptance testing. Engineers and technicians are presently attaching the engines to the first stage of the vehicle.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin will now pivot to launching a prototype of its Blue Ring transfer vehicle on the debut launch of New Glenn, with the intent of testing the electronics, avionics, and other systems on the vehicle. Blue Origin is targeting the first half of November for this launch. This test flight will also serve as the first of three \u201ccertification\u201d flights for New Glenn, which will allow the vehicle to become eligible to carry national security payloads for the US Space Force.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s nearly been a year since Bezos tapped a former Amazon executive, Dave Limp, to lead Blue Origin. Bezos tasked the company\u2019s new chief executive with injecting a sense of purpose toward getting New Glenn flying as soon as possible. Bezos has made a launch this year a high priority.<\/p>\n
In an email to Blue Origin employees on Friday, Limp expressed that sense of urgency.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t take our foot off the pedal here,\u201d Limp wrote. \u201cEveryone\u2019s work to get us to NG-1 flight this year is critical and I\u2019m so appreciative of everyone\u2019s relentless dedication to make this happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for ESCAPADE, the mission could launch in the spring of 2025. Although the \u201cMars window\u201d only opens every 18 to 24 months, there are complex trajectories by which a payload launched in the spring of 2025 could reach the red planet. It\u2019s also possible that NASA and Blue Origin could ultimately wait until the next Mars window opens in November 2026 to launch the mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASA and Blue Origin announced Friday that they have agreed to delay the launch of the ESCAPADE mission to Mars until at least the spring of 2025. The decision to stand down from a launch attempt in mid-October was driven by a deadline to begin loading hypergolic propellant on the two small ESCAPADE (Escape and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,21],"class_list":["post-44873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44873"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}