Blue Origin canceled Sunday's launch attempt due to bad weather, a cruise ship in restricted waters near the launch site and problems with the ground system. The company says the next available launch opportunity is Wednesday, November 12, with the window opening at 2:50 pm EST (7:50 pm UTC).
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The field of astrodynamics is not a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems that trajectory analysts can come up with a solution straight out of a hat.
That's what it took to save NASA's ESCAPADE mission from a long delay and possible cancellation after its rocket wasn't ready to send it to Mars during its scheduled launch window last year. ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, consists of two identical spacecraft heading to the Red Planet as early as Sunday, launching aboard Blue Origin's massive New Glenn rocket.
“ESCAPADE follows a very unusual trajectory on its way to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission's principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “We're launching outside of the typical Hochmann transfer windowswhich occur every 25 or 26 months. “We're taking a very flexible approach to mission design, where we go into a loitering orbit around the Earth to kind of wait until the Earth and Mars line up correctly next November to go to Mars.”
This was not the original plan. When it was first designed, ESCAPADE was envisioned to follow a direct course from Earth to Mars, a transit that typically takes six to nine months. But ESCAPADE will now leave Earth when Mars is more than 220 million miles away, on the opposite side of the solar system.
The payload fairing of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which carries two NASA science probes bound for Mars.
Credit: Blue Origin
The last launch window for Mars was last year, and the next one won't come until late 2026. The planets are not currently aligned and the proverbial stars are not aligned to get the ESCAPADE satellites and their New Glenn rocket to the launch pad until this weekend.
This is fine
But there are several reasons why NASA is quite happy with this. The New Glenn rocket is too good for this mission. A two-stage launcher could send many tons of payload to Mars, but NASA is asking to send only about a ton of payload, consisting of a pair of identical science probes designed to study how the planet's upper atmosphere interacts with the solar wind.
But NASA struck a lucrative deal with Blue Origin. The space agency is paying Jeff Bezos' space company about $20 million per launch, less than the dedicated launch of any other rocket capable of sending the ESCAPADE mission to Mars. In exchange, NASA accepts a higher-than-usual chance of a launch failure. After all, this is only the second flight of the 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which has not yet been certified by NASA or the U.S. Space Force.
