Blue Origin Scrubs Launch of NASA’s ESCAPADE Mission to Mars

Science|Blue Origin to Launch NASA’s ESCAPADE Mission to Mars: How to Watch

New Glenn, the powerful orbital rocket built by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, is on a launchpad in Florida. It 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 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 Sunday afternoon during an 88-minute launch window that begins at 2:45 p.m. Eastern time and ends at 4:13 p.m.

Blue Origin will provide online coverage of the launch starting 45 minutes before liftoff.

If the launch is delayed by weather or a technical glitch, it may be grounded indefinitely. In an attempt to relieve congestion in the nation’s airspace during the ongoing federal government shutdown, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that, beginning on Monday, no commercial rockets can lift off between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. local time.

Blue Origin officials said they were talking with the F.A.A. to see if they could obtain an exception if Sunday’s launch attempt were to be called off.

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.

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.