Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab will depart California for Florida this weekend to begin preparations for the first launch aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
The two scientific probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only once every 26 months. NASA has partnered with Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, awarded a $20 million contract to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Probe (ESCAPADE) mission.
Last November, NASA confirmed that the $79 million ESCAPADE mission would launch on the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, information that suddenly clarified the murky timeline for Blue Origin’s long-delayed first New Glenn mission.
The launch window begins on September 29. Two identical Mars-bound spacecraft for the ESCAPADE mission, nicknamed the Blue and Gold, are complete. Rocket Lab said on Friday that its manufacturing team has packaged the satellites and shipped them from its factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, the satellites will arrive at a clean-room facility just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform a final inspection and load hydrazine fuel onto the two spacecraft, each weighing just over half a ton.
Then, once Blue Origin is ready, a ground team will connect the ESCAPADE spacecraft to the New Glenn launch adapter and encapsulate the probe inside a payload fairing for attachment to the top of the rocket.
“There’s a bunch of checks and tests to make sure everything’s OK, and then we’ll move on to fueling and integrating it with the launch vehicle, so this is a big milestone,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s chief scientist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Institute. “There have been some challenges along the way. It wasn’t easy to get this done on this schedule and at this cost, so we’re very happy with where we are now.”
Race to the finish line
But there’s a lot Blue Origin needs to accomplish in the next few months before the New Glenn rocket is ready to send the ESCAPADE mission to Mars within this year’s launch window. Blue Origin has not fully tested the New Glenn rocket during launch countdown, has not fully loaded the launch vehicle with cryogenic propellant, and has not test fired a full first- or second-stage engine.
This work typically occurs several months before the first launch of a new, larger orbital rocket. By comparison, SpaceX test-fired its first fully assembled Falcon 9 rocket from the launch pad about three months before its first flight in 2010. United Launch Alliance completed hot-fire pad testing of its new Vulcan rocket last year, about seven months before its first flight.
But after years of speculation and little sign of progress, Blue Origin is making visible progress toward New Glenn’s first flight. Earlier this year, the company launched a full-scale, 320-foot-long (98-meter-long) New Glenn rocket from a pad at Cape Canaveral Space Station, loaded with liquid nitrogen, a cryogenic alternative to the methane and liquid hydrogen fuels that are burned in flight.
