New Glenn right after launch.
It’s off! The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission is on its way to Mars. It was sent into orbit by New Glenn, the heavy-lift launch vehicle from Blue Origin, the private space firm headed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The rocket flew successfully after a previous scrubbed launch on November 13.
This was the second launch ever for New Glenn, following the inaugural launch in January, and it was the first time that its booster successfully landed. This is only one of the few reusable launch vehicles that have been successfully recovered, and is only the second one beyond SpaceX's Super Heavy that has nailed a vertical recovery.
The video of the reentry is impressive. Once the rocket took the payload into orbit, the first stage booster, called Never Tell Me The Odds, fell back into the atmosphere. As it came down, it relit its engine, reducing its speed – which is helped by the specific motion through the atmosphere – before a second burn, the booster landing burn, got the vehicle vertical and all the way to the touchdown point. Touchdown was the landing barge Jacklyn, located 604 kilometers (375 miles) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
The ESCAPADE mission is very exciting. It consists of two probes that will observe Mars at the same time from different locations around it. They will study how the very thin atmosphere of the planet is changed by the flow of particles from the Sun, not only to provide insight into what the atmosphere is today, but also how it has lost so much of it over billions of years.
"ESCAPADE will analyze how Mars’ magnetic field guides particle flows around the planet, how energy and momentum are transported from the solar wind through the magnetosphere, and what processes control the flow of energy and matter into and out of the Martian atmosphere," NASA explains, adding that "the observations will reveal the planet’s real-time response to space weather and how the Martian magnetosphere changes over time."
ESCAPADE is part of NASA's SIMPLEx program, and it was manufactured by Rocket Lab for UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. It will reach Mars in about 11 months. At around $80 million, it is also an extremely cheap mission as far as space missions go, similar to the Mars orbiter from the Indian Space Research Organization launched a decade ago.
New Glenn has an exciting year ahead with several launches scheduled. The most exciting might be in January 2026 with the first test of Blue Moon, the Blue Origin lander, which will take astronauts down to the Moon. This was planned for a later Artemis mission, but the delays on Starship might shift the plan, something that has angered SpaceX CEO Elon Musk enough to have a public fight with NASA.
