New Glenn, the powerful orbital rocket built by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, is still on a launchpad in Florida after postponed launch attempts on Sunday and Wednesday. The rocket is ready for its second mission.
Tucked inside the rocket is NASA’s ESCAPADE mission — two identical spacecraft that will orbit Mars to measure the dynamics of that planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere.
But that is only one goal for the launch. Blue Origin will attempt on Thursday to land the rocket’s booster stage on a floating platform in the Atlantic, a feat that only Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has so far achieved.
When is the launch and how can I watch?
Liftoff from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida is scheduled for Thursday afternoon during an 88-minute launch window that begins at 2:57 p.m. Eastern and ends at 4:25 p.m.
Blue Origin is providing online coverage of the launch, starting 20 minutes before liftoff.
Sunday’s launch was postponed because of poor weather over the launchpad, and then Wednesday’s flight was called off.
How did the sun cause Wednesday’s postponement?
On Wednesday, the weather cleared. The rocket was ready, as was ESCAPADE.
Then space weather intervened.
On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the sun shot off three coronal mass ejections — gargantuan belches of high-speed charged particles — that headed in the direction of the Earth. Two of those merged and slammed into Earth’s magnetic field on Tuesday, generating colorful light shows in the night sky.
The energetic particles also wreak havoc on electronics.
The radiation from Tuesday’s bombardment was beginning to die down, and the launch would have gone ahead, said Rob Lillis, the principal investigator for ESCAPADE.
But then came word that the third mass coronal ejection would strike at the time that ESCAPADE was heading out on its own.
The key worry was that the geomagnetic storm would crash the computers of the spacecraft, preventing the solar arrays from deploying and killing the spacecraft.
That third coronal mass ejection turned out not to be a monster, but there was no way to know that ahead of time.
What is the New Glenn rocket?
At 321 feet tall, New Glenn is a giant. It is taller than the Falcon 9 rockets regularly flown by SpaceX, but shorter than the Starship vehicle the company is testing in Texas.
The rocket is named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.
Its payload nose cone, at seven meters wide, offers at least twice as much space for payloads as other rockets currently in operation.
The booster stage — the lower part of the rocket that lifts off the ground and carries the upper stage through the densest part of the atmosphere — is designed to land and to be reused.
Where will the rocket booster attempt to land?
After it propels the rocket up through the dense, lower part of the atmosphere, the giant New Glenn booster stage will drop away and try to set down on a floating platform named Jacklyn, after Mr. Bezos’ mother.
That boat is already positioned about 375 miles off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
Wait, doesn’t SpaceX do that all the time?
Yes, SpaceX regularly recovers the booster stages of its Falcon 9 rockets, then reflies them, a feat it first accomplished a decade ago. Since then, SpaceX has successfully landed the boosters more than 500 times. One of its boosters has flown 31 times.
No other company has landed a stage of an orbital-class rocket. Blue Origin does land and reuse the boosters of its much smaller New Shepard rockets, which send tourists and science experiments on up-and-down, suborbital flights to the edge of space, but not to orbit. Reusing the booster stage of New Glenn will be key to speeding the pace of launches if Blue Origin is to become a serious competitor to SpaceX.
In the near future, a Chinese company, Landspace, is also aiming to land the booster of its new Zhuque-3 rocket, which, at first glance, looks like a clone of the Falcon 9.
What payloads is the New Glenn rocket carrying?
This rocket is carrying ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers, a NASA-financed mission developed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The mission consists of two identical spacecraft named Blue and Gold — the school colors of Berkeley.
The two spacecraft will take a long, slow trip to Mars, arriving in September 2027. After they reach their destination, Blue and Gold will spend at least a year orbiting the red planet to take measurements of the magnetic field around it, as well as the dance of charged particles in the thin atmosphere.
The rocket is also carrying a NASA communications technology demonstration from the company Viasat.
What happened during the first New Glenn launch?
ESCAPADE was originally scheduled to launch on the first New Glenn mission in October 2024. However, when it appeared that New Glenn would not be ready in time, NASA decided to pull the mission off that flight and put the spacecraft into storage.
The first New Glenn finally launched in January, and its primary mission was a success. The payload — a demonstration of Blue Ring, a technology that Blue Origin is developing to move payloads around in space — made it to orbit and successfully completed its tests.
But the secondary goal of landing the booster was not successful. The booster’s engines failed to reignite as it re-entered the atmosphere, and it crashed into the Atlantic instead of landing on the Jacklyn floating platform.
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
The post Blue Origin to Launch NASA’s ESCAPADE Mission to Mars: How to Watch appeared first on New York Times.
