Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture achieved a significant milestone today with the successful recovery of its New Glenn rocket booster during the launch of the Escapade probes destined for Mars. This marked a crucial step in the company’s efforts to compete with SpaceX and represented the first-ever successful recovery of a New Glenn booster.
The launch, which occurred from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, followed several attempts due to cloudy weather and a solar storm. The mission’s primary goal is to deploy twin robotic spacecraft – the Escapade probes – to study Mars’ magnetic field, atmosphere, and ionosphere. The name ‘Escapade’ is an acronym for ‘ESCApe and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers’.
A key element of the mission involved recovering the New Glenn booster, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” which successfully splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. Blue Origin team members celebrated the achievement, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control. The probes are equipped with sophisticated hardware for ViaSat’s HaloNet telemetry relay service, testing an alternative to NASA’s TDRS system.
The Escapade probes will follow a looping trajectory, including an Earth flyby in a year, with a planned arrival at Mars in 2027. Scientists, led by Robert Lillis at UC-Berkeley, believe the data gathered will be crucial for future crewed missions to Mars and for understanding the planet’s climate evolution, including the process of atmospheric escape.
Blue Origin plans to utilize the “Never Tell Me the Odds” booster again, launching an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the moon’s south polar region in the coming months.