SYDNEY — Preparations for the second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, carrying a NASA Mars mission, remain on track for liftoff in the next few weeks.
Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress here Oct. 1, Laura Maginnis, vice president of New Glenn mission management at Blue Origin, said the company is making steady progress toward launching NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft arrived in Florida in mid-September and will be fueled in the coming weeks. “Everything is going really smoothly there,” she said.
The rocket itself is also in advanced stages of preparation. The next major milestone will be a hot-fire test of the vehicle’s first stage on the pad, scheduled for “a few weeks” from now, Maginnis said. The stage will then be rolled back and mated with the upper stage and spacecraft.
Maginnis did not provide a specific launch date, saying only that the mission is scheduled for the “coming weeks.” A NASA Launch Services Program official said on an agency webcast Sept. 24 that the launch is expected in late October or early November. NASA issued a media advisory Sept. 30 stating only that the launch was expected “later this fall.”
Delays in the launch, originally scheduled for 2024, have forced adjustments to the mission’s trajectory. Maginnis said the initial plan called for New Glenn to place ESCAPADE into a supersynchronous transfer orbit with an apogee of about 100,000 kilometers, after which the spacecraft would use their thrusters to head to Mars.
As the launch slipped into fall 2024, Blue Origin switched to a direct injection trajectory, but the rocket was not ready before the October Mars transfer window closed.
The mission team then developed alternative trajectories that would allow ESCAPADE to enter Earth orbit or travel to the Earth-sun L2 Lagrange point and remain there until the next Mars window opens in late 2026. That approach means ESCAPADE can launch on almost any day this year, rather than being limited to traditional Mars windows that open for only a few weeks every two years.
Maginnis said that flexibility creates daily launch windows of about 90 minutes, which would remain available if the launch slips to later in November or December.
She expressed confidence in the mission following New Glenn’s inaugural flight in January. “The mission was very clean,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of major anomalies. We didn’t see major issues with system performance.”
One exception, she noted, was the failure to land the first stage on a ship, but she called that a “very ambitious target” for a first launch. Blue Origin expects a “better chance of success” on the upcoming attempt.
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