The first multi-spacecraft science mission to launch to Mars is now on its way, and catching a ride on the twin probes are the first kiwis to fly to the red planet.
NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission lifted off on a 22-month trip to Mars on Thursday aboard a New Glenn rocket. Once there, the identical satellites will enter Martian orbit to study in real time how space weather affects the planet’s hybrid magnetosphere and how the interaction drove Mars to lose its once-dense atmosphere.
Led by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley—the two spacecraft are named “Blue” and “Gold” after the school’s colors—the ESCAPADE probes are the first Mars-bound vehicles to be designed, built, and tested by Rocket Lab, the end-to-end space company headquartered in California but founded in New Zealand.
The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.
“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
The trouble-free launch of NASA’s Escapade probes, plus today’s first-ever recovery of a New Glenn booster, bolstered Blue Origin’s status as a worthy competitor for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has come to dominate the space industry. SpaceX is the only other company to bring back an orbital-class booster successfully.
Even Musk recognized the achievement: “Congratulations @JeffBezos and the @BlueOrigin team!” he wrote in a posting to X / Twitter, the social-media platform he owns.
New Glenn — which is named after John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit — rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT). Today’s liftoff followed attempts earlier this week that had to be scratched, initially due to cloudy weather on Earth, and then due to a solar storm in space.
Even on the day of launch, the countdown had to be held and recycled a couple of times for unspecified reasons. But in the end, liftoff was gloriously nominal.
Minutes after New Glenn rose into the sky, the mission plan called for the rocket’s first-stage booster to fly itself back to a touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic that was named Jacklyn after Bezos’ late mother. Blue Origin’s first attempt to recover a New Glenn booster failed in January — but this time, the maneuver was successful.
That achievement was greeted by wild cheers from Blue Origin team members watching the webcast, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control and a crowd at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The uncertainty about recovering the booster was reflected in the nickname it was given: “Never Tell Me the Odds.”
“Congratulations, Team Blue — you guys did it!” launch commentator Ariane Cornell, vice president of New Glenn strategy and business operations, said during the webcast. “What an incredible day for Blue Origin, for the space industry.”
Cornell’s co-host for the webcast, Tabitha Lipkin, was similarly enthused. “I think I hurt my hand on the table banging too much,” she said.
Meanwhile, New Glenn’s second stage pressed onward to orbit. A little more than half an hour after launch, the second stage deployed two robotic spacecraft for NASA’s Escapade mission to Mars. (The name for the $78.5 million mission is an acronym for “ESCApe and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers.”)
The twin probes will follow a loitering, looping trajectory that includes an Earth flyby a year from now. That slingshot maneuver should provide an extra boost to put the spacecraft into Martian orbit in 2027. Once the probes have settled into synchronized orbits, they’ll fly in formation to map the Red Planet’s magnetic field, upper atmosphere and ionosphere in stereo. The science mission is due to last until 2029.
Scientists say Escapade should help NASA prepare for future crewed missions to Mars.
“Understanding how the ionosphere varies will be a really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions in radio signals that we will need to communicate with each other and to navigate on Mars,” principal investigator Robert Lillis, a space physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a news release. Findings from Escapade could also help scientists work out ways to deal with the radiation risks associated with missions on Mars.
On the space science side of things, Escapade could shed light on the process by which Mars lost much of its atmosphere over the course of billions of years. “To understand how the solar wind drives different kinds of atmospheric escape is a key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars,” Lillis said.
NASA put UC-Berkeley in charge of operating the probes, which have been named Blue and Gold in honor of Berkeley’s school colors. Rocket Lab USA built the spacecraft, and Blue Origin won the launch order in 2023, two years before New Glenn ever flew.
Escapade was originally scheduled for liftoff a year ago, but NASA postponed the start of the mission, citing the potential costs of a launch delay that “could be caused by a number of factors” — presumably including a scenario in which Blue Origin’s rocket wasn’t yet ready for liftoff. Additional delays arose as Blue Origin followed up on lessons learned from January’s first New Glenn launch.
In addition to launching the Escapade probes, New Glenn carried demonstration hardware for ViaSat’s HaloNet telemetry relay service. HaloNet was tested as part of a program aimed at switching space communication channels from NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system, or TDRS, to commercial satellites.
In a post-launch news release, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said “we achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team.”
“It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds had perfect odds — never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try,” Limp said. “This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
New Glenn is designed to send up to 45 metric tons of payload to low Earth orbit, and smaller payloads to destinations beyond Earth orbit. That makes the rocket more powerful than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket (23 metric tons to LEO), but less powerful than the Falcon Heavy (64 metric tons) or Starship (100 to 150 metric tons). Starship is still in development; a modified version of that rocket is currently due to carry NASA astronauts on the lunar surface in the 2027-2028 time frame.
Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, joined his boss in congratulating Blue Origin: “Recovering an orbital-class rocket is incredibly hard. Well done!” he wrote on X. “We as Americans should be very proud of what we are accomplishing in space.”
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy added his congratulations. “This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface,” Duffy said in a written statement. “Every launch of New Glenn provides data that will be essential when we launch MK-1 through Artemis. All of this information will be critical to protect future NASA explorers and invaluable as we evaluate how to deliver on President Trump’s vision of planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars.”
Sometime in the next few months, Blue Origin plans to use New Glenn to launch an uncrewed Blue Moon MK-1 lander to the moon’s south polar region. And thanks to today’s successful recovery at sea, there’s a chance that “Never Tell Me the Odds” could be reused as the first-stage booster for that launch.
Bezos and Limp both posted pictures and videos on social media with comments on the day’s achievements. Here are a few highlights:
Good overview of the landing. We nominally target a few hundred feet away from Jacklyn to avoid a severe impact if engines fail to start or start slowly. We’ll incrementally reduce that conservatism over time. We are all excited and grateful for yesterday. Amazing performance by… pic.twitter.com/DCEMsuSyPm
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The second flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was postponed again Wednesday as a supercharged wave of magnetized plasma from the Sun enveloped the Earth, triggering colorful auroral displays and concerns over possible impacts to communications, navigation, and power grids.
Solar storms like the one this week can also affect satellite operations. That is the worry that caused NASA to hold off on launching a pair of science probes from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Wednesday aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
In a statement, Blue Origin said NASA, its customer on the upcoming launch, decided to postpone the mission to send the agency’s two ESCAPADE spacecraft on a journey to Mars.
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