Rocket Lab’s Mars probes reach launch site ahead of 1st flight on Blue Origin New Glenn rocket

…New Glenn is 322 feet (98 meters) tall, roughly the height of a 30-story building, and is capable of launching roughly 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit. Its maiden flight will come after more than a decade of development by Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and over three years later than the company hoped for.

Once the ESCAPADE satellites reach Mars in September 2025, “the mission team will need several months to configure their orbits for science observations,” NASA said in the recent news release. Their orbit will be adjusted over several months such that by early 2026 they’ll follow each other in a “string of pearls” formation, which will allow them to gather data on Mars’ rapidly changing response to the solar wind.

They will later break into different orbits such that they can observe both the solar wind and Mars’ upper atmosphere in real time, according to the space agency. The science mission is designed to last 11 months in Mars orbit, until March 2027.

Meanwhile, the New Glenn first stage is expected to return to Earth shortly after liftoff, demonstrating its reusability. Blue Origin has said that the first stage will operate like a commercial airliner but with cleaner fuel, leading to less waste and lower launch costs.

In recent weeks, portions of other New Glenn rockets scheduled for future flights have suffered damage, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 21. In one incident, the top of Blue Origin’s second New Glenn rocket crumpled “like a crushed Coke can,” partly due to an error by factory workers who had moved the section into a chilled storage hangar but didn’t monitor the hardware afterward. In the second incident, a part of the third New Glenn rocket failed during stress testing and exploded inside a building.

No injuries were reported in either incident, according to Bloomberg, which first broke the news about the recent failures. The issues haven’t affected New Glenn’s planned debut launch in October, a Blue Origin spokesperson told GeekWire’s Alan Boyle.

At least you know that a guy who owns the Washington Post is not a rightwing Trumptard.

What really bothers me is that NASA has to rely on someone who works for Donald Trump for transportation. (Or is it the other way round?)

They feel NASA overreacted to the scope of the problems. NASA’s safety first mindset was the final decision maker. If there are no problems with Starliner’s unmanned return Boeing can say “I told you so.”