Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on Thursday launched its giant New Glenn rocket from Florida for paying customers, carrying two satellites on its way to Mars on NASA’s first science mission.
The powerful two-stage rocket, which stands 32 stories high, blasted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, marking Blue Origin’s first mission since Jan. 16.
Blue Origin’s live webcast showed the rocket rising from the launch tower in a roar of flames and billowing clouds of steam moments after seven BE-4 engines roared to life, gobbling up more than 2,800 pounds (1,270 kg) of liquid fuel per second.
The launch was delayed a few days later due to cloudy skies and a geomagnetic storm.
If all goes as planned, New Glenn’s reusable first-stage booster will separate from the rocket’s upper stage minutes after launch to fly back to Earth and attempt to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean while the upper stage rises higher. A reverse landing maneuver in January failed due to engine failure.
The primary mission for Thursday’s launch is NASA’s twin EscaPADE spacecraft, designed to orbit Mars together and analyze how solar winds — streams of high-energy charged particles from the sun — interact with the planet’s magnetic field and how those interactions may contribute to the depletion of Mars’ thin atmosphere.
The twin spacecraft, dubbed Blue and Gold, were scheduled to lift off from the rocket’s upper stage cargo bay about 30 minutes after launch for a 22-month trip to Mars, before entering satellite mode to begin an 11-month synchronous orbit survey of the Red Planet.
Satellite company Viasat also has a payload that will remain attached to the upper stage of a New Glenn rocket, technically demonstrating a space communications relay above Earth.
GAME TO MEET SPACEX
EscaPADE — short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — was originally slated for a 2024 launch. in October, but New Glenn development setbacks delayed it for more than a year.
When the rocket made its test flight in January, it was carrying Blue Origin’s own payload, a prototype of the maneuverable Blue Ring spacecraft the company is developing for the Pentagon and commercial customers.
The blue and gold satellites were built by Rocket Lab, a California-based aerospace company for NASA, and instrumented by the University of California, Berkeley.
in 2000 Bezos-founded Blue Origin has until now been known mostly for its space tourism business, which has flown wealthy passengers to the edge of space aboard the suborbital New Shepard, a smaller single-stage reusable vehicle whose capsule also houses more than 200 research experiments.
If Thursday’s launch is successful, EscaPADE would be Blue Origin’s first scientific payload sent into space by a paying customer, a major milestone for the Bezos-owned company to compete on an equal footing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the world’s most active rocket launch service.
Over the past two years, SpaceX has launched its Falcon rockets on nearly 280 missions, most of them in service of its Starlink satellite business.
Blue Origin has spent billions of dollars over the past decade building the New Glenn, a heavy-duty rocket designed to be the company’s workhorse of carrying people and cargo into space. Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, it generates twice the thrust of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and about the same thrust as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy vehicle during takeoff, while offering more cargo space than any of its competitors.
According to federal procurement data, NASA paid approximately $55 million for the EscaPADE mission.
Blue Origin also supplies engines for other companies’ rockets, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. In addition, NASA’s Artemis Lunar Exploration Program has a crew on the Moon as well as a space station in collaboration with other entities.
Blue Origin has a long way to go to catch up with SpaceX, which has launched several hundred Falcon 9 missions to become the world’s dominant launch provider, rivaled only by China’s space program.
Musk’s company is also developing the next-generation Starship rocket, a stainless-steel behemoth designed to be fully reusable and capable of a variety of missions, including flights to the moon and Mars and expanding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. Starship will become the most powerful rocket in the world when it enters service.
(Reporting by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)