NG-2: Blue Orign New Glenn Launches NASA's ESCAPADE To Mars, Lands Booster Successfully For The First Time

Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket on its second flight from Launch Complex 36(LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida's space coast, on Thurday(Nov. 13), at 2045 UTC, deploying NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) twin spacecraft on a novel trajectory toward Mars.

The NG-2 mission marked the first customer payload launch for New Glenn and achieved a historic milestone with the successful vertical landing of the first-stage booster, GS1-SN002(nicknamed "Never Tell Me The Odds"), on the autonomous recovery ship "Jacklyn" in the Atlantic Ocean.

Following liftoff at T+0, and 3 minutes of powered flight, the first stage separated following main engin cutoff, and initiated a series of deceleration burns. At T+7 minutes, GS1-SN002 reignited three of its seven BE-4 engines for atmospheric entry, followed by a landing burn at T+8:27 minutes, culminating in a vertical touchdown on Jacklyn at T+9:09 minutes, validating the rocket’s reusability and a key step toward commercial viability.

"A landed orbital rocket!" Blue Origin's Ariane Cornell said during the company's launch webcast today. "What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry." The Jeff Bezos company tried for a similar landing during the first New Glenn launch in January of this year but was unsuccessful. 

Meanwhile the second stage, powered by two BE-3U engines, continued to orbit, performing two burns to achieve the required Earth-escape trajectory.

The ESCAPADE spacecraft were deployed 33.5 minutes after liftoff, beginning a 30-second separation sequence. The twin probes, Blue and Gold, were released into a loiter orbit around the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2, an area of gravitational stability located approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

"ESCAPADE, you are headed to Mars!" Cornell said after the second spacecraft separated from New Glenn's upper stage.

ESCAPADE, is a low-cost, dual-spacecraft mission led by the University of California, Berkeley, and built by Rocket Lab for NASA. The mission, costing $107.4 million, aims to study how Mars lost its atmosphere by measuring the interaction between the solar wind and the planet’s upper atmosphere.

Due to the timing, the mission could not launch during the traditional 26-month Earth-Mars transfer window, so it adopted a novel trajectory: the probes will spend 11 months in a loiter orbit beyond the Moon before performing a gravity assist flyby of Earth in November 2026. This maneuver will provide the necessary velocity to reach Mars, with arrival scheduled for September 2027.

The twin spacecraft will operate in tandem to provide a "stereo view" of space weather processes, enabling unprecedented cause-and-effect analysis of atmospheric escape.

"I think ESCAPADE is really exciting because it's a trailblazer, a pathfinder if you will, for what we think is a new way of doing space science missions," ESCAPADE Principal Investigator Robert Lillis, of the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, told reporters during a press briefing on Saturday (Nov. 8).

"We build a high delta V system that not only cruises to Mars and performs the Mars orbit insertion maneuver, but first climbs out of the Earth's gravity well, eliminating the need for Mars direct transfer from the launch vehicle, significantly increasing the available launch options," Richard French, Rocket Lab's vice president of business development and strategy, told reporters on Saturday.

If all goes well, ESCAPADE will leave its Lagrange point 2 loiter spot in November 2026 and arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in September 2027. Once there, mission leads at the University of California, Berkeley will operate the orbiters, dubbed Blue and Gold (for the university's colors), for about 11 months.

The probes will collect data with four different science instruments (which are identical on both of them). The science team will use this information to construct a 3D map of the environment around Mars to study how the solar wind contributes to the depletion of Mars' atmosphere, among other tasks.

"The geological evidence shows that Mars once had water on it, and in order to keep the water, you need a thick atmosphere,” ESCAPADE Deputy Principal Investigator Shaosui Xu, a space physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said in a statement.

"So we know that there was a thick enough atmosphere on Mars once upon a time, but now it is very tenuous," Xu added. "There are only two ways for atmosphere to leave — either go into the ground or escape to space, and there are a lot of studies showing that escape has been a very significant contributor to the evolution of the atmosphere."

Lillis said the misson team is particularly excited because ESCAPADE will study Mars in tandem with other spacecraft already at the Red Planet. NASA's MAVEN orbiter has been closely studying the planet's atmosphere since its arrival there in 2014. Other spacecraft at Mars include NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and two European orbiters — Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. And Japan's planned Mars Moons Explorer mission will track the solar wind at the Martian moon Phobos, giving yet another eye on space weather at the Red Planet.

"This is a really exciting time where we're going to have all these assets at Mars," Lillis said.

ESCAPADE is the first Mars mission to launch in more than five years. The most recent one, NASA's Perseverance rover (and ride-along Ingenuity helicopter) lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in July 2020.

Thursday's mission also tested Viasat’s InRange telemetry relay service for NASA’s future communications needs.

In addition to ESCAPADE, New Glenn carried a secondary payload for customer ViaSat to test that company's InRange launch telemetry relay service as part of a project for NASA's Communications Services Project (CSP). The technology could be used in a successor system for NASA's aging Telemetry and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system.

"We are excited to be working with Blue Origin as our launch partner to showcase our innovative launch telemetry services,” Susan Miller, president of Viasat Government, said in a statement. "As NASA looks ahead to replacing the TDRS system, commercial capabilities need to deliver greater performance, flexibility and resilience to support future missions."

Blue Origin is now the second company in history to recover a rocket during an operational flight. This practice has become the norm for SpaceX, which has so mastered landing and reusing its Falcon 9 rocket that boosters launching for the first time are now a rarity.

The success of today's flight also puts New Glenn one step closer toward qualification to fly lucrative national security payload contracts for the U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Blue Origin already has a manifest of missions for customers ranging from the U.S. government to communications companies. The company has also partnered with Amazon, to help launch the Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) satellite-internet megaconstellation, which will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network. Amazon currently has a license to launch over 3,000 Kuiper internet satellites, which will fly on a variety of different rockets.

Standing 98 meters) tall with a 7-meter diameter, New Glenn is a partially reusable, heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of carrying up to 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit(LEO). It uses seven BE-4 engines on its first stage, powered by liquid methane and liquid oxygen, and two BE-3U engines on its second stage, using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The first stage is designed for at least 25 flights with refurbishment, aiming to reduce launch costs.

New Glenn is comparable to, but not quite as powerful as, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and not comparable to Starship megarocket. It has nearly twice the lifting capacity as United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur. Blue Origin intends to position New Glenn to take on some of the Falcon 9's current share of the launch market.