Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket.
These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.
Last November, the space agency confirmed the $79 million ESCAPADE mission will launch on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. With this piece of information, the opaque schedule for Blue Origin's long-delayed first New Glenn mission suddenly became more clear.
The launch period opens on September 29. The two identical Mars-bound spacecraft for the ESCAPADE mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, are now complete. Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass.
Then, if Blue Origin is ready, ground teams will connect the ESCAPADE spacecraft with the New Glenn's launch adapter, encapsulate the probes inside the payload fairing, and mount them on top of the rocket.
"There's a whole bunch of checking and tests to make sure everything's OK, and then we move into fueling, and then we integrate with the launch vehicle. So it's a big milestone," said Rob Lillis, the mission's lead scientist from the University of California Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory. "There have been some challenges along the way. This wasn't easy to make happen on this schedule and for this cost. So we're very happy to be where we are."
Racing to the finish line
But there's a lot for Blue Origin to accomplish in the next couple of months if the New Glenn rocket is going to be ready to send the ESCAPADE mission toward Mars in this year's launch period. Blue Origin has not fully exercised a New Glenn rocket during a launch countdown, hasn't pumped a full load of cryogenic propellants into the launch vehicle, and hasn't test-fired a full complement of first stage or second stage engines.
These activities typically take place months before the first launch of a large new orbital-class rocket. For comparison, SpaceX test-fired its first fully assembled Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad about three months before its first flight in 2010. United Launch Alliance completed a hot-fire test of its new Vulcan rocket on the launch pad last year, about seven months before its inaugural flight.
However, Blue Origin is making visible progress toward the first flight of New Glenn, after years of speculation and few outward signs of advancement. Earlier this year, the company raised a full-scale, 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and loaded it with liquid nitrogen, a cryogenic substitute for the methane and liquid hydrogen fuel it will burn in flight.
More recently, Blue Origin lifted a full-scale test booster with a crane at Port Canaveral, a few miles south of the launch pad, to demonstrate how the company will recover reusable New Glenn rockets from a landing barge.
Once at Mars, the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will measure plasma and magnetic fields around the red planet. With simultaneous observations from two locations around Mars, scientists hope to learn more about the processes that strip away atoms from the magnetosphere and upper atmosphere, which drive Martian climate change.
Rocket Lab designed, built, and tested the two ESCAPADE spacecraft in a little more than three years. This is relatively fast for an interplanetary science mission. NASA selected the ESCAPADE mission for development in 2019 as part of a new class of small planetary science missions in which scientists can propose concepts for modest probes to explore the Solar System.
ESCAPADE was originally supposed to launch as a piggyback payload with NASA's Psyche asteroid mission in 2022, but the agency decided to switch the Psyche launch from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to a larger Falcon Heavy. "So they changed their launch targets, and in doing so, it kind of broke our mission design, or at least very nearly broke it," Lillis said.
"We had to do a rapid redesign of the spacecraft and the mission with only about two months before our Preliminary Design Review [PDR] back in 2020, and it was a disaster," he said. "We failed our PDR, but it wasn't really our fault. So NASA gave us another couple million dollars, and it was 10 more months to come up with a mission design that was resilient and flexible and could work with a range of different launch options."
The redesign resulted in size growth for the ESCAPADE probes and a change in spacecraft builders, from Tyvak to Rocket Lab.
"So that was the first thing, and then there were certainly challenges on the Rocket Lab side," Lillis told Ars. "The thruster changed. There were also significant problems getting the tanks delivered ... so they really went into hero mode. They went and actually spun up an entire internal 3D tank-printing capability from nothing. Once things started looking shaky with this tank supplier, they came through.
"Those printed tanks are on the spacecraft, and they're all qualified, etc. So that was a huge win," he said. "That could have totally been a mission killer, the tank issue."
The ESCAPADE spacecraft are based on Rocket Lab's Explorer-class design, a new version of the Photon spacecraft platform, itself derived from the kick stage of the company's Electron rocket.
"We’ve already been to the Moon for NASA, so we’re excited to build on that and send Rocket Lab technology deeper into the solar system, this time to the Red Planet," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Sir Peter Beck said in a statement. "Our space systems team has built a beautiful and highly capable pair of spacecraft to help NASA and the University of California Berkeley further humanity’s understanding of Mars.
"We couldn’t be prouder to be an ESCAPADE mission partner enabling science and exploration missions beyond our planet. After a meticulous but speedy build and test phase, we’re excited to have Blue and Gold on their way to the Cape and a step closer to Mars."
Even a large rocket like New Glenn can't send ESCAPADE on a direct trajectory toward Mars after late October, so the clock is ticking for Blue Origin. It wouldn't be a surprise if the rocket isn't ready to fly with ESCAPADE during this narrow launch window. However, the relatively low cost of ESCAPADE allows NASA to accept some additional risk. The agency wouldn't be comfortable putting a billion-dollar Mars mission on an unproven rocket like Blue Origin's New Glenn.
NASA selected Blue Origin for the launch of ESCAPADE through the agency's VADR (Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare) contract. This contract mechanism comes with little oversight from NASA, which takes a more hands-off approach than it would take with a launch provider booked to launch a more expensive spacecraft, such as the $5 billion Europa Clipper mission also slated to launch from Florida this fall. This type of contract typically comes with a lower price.
Assuming ESCAPADE can leave Earth this year, the twin spacecraft would arrive in orbit around Mars on September 1 and September 3, 2025. If ESCAPADE misses this year's launch window, the next opportunity to head for Mars will come in late 2026.
