WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has confirmed that a NASA Mars smallsat mission, bumped from the inaugural launch of the New Glenn rocket, will be on the vehicle’s second flight later this year.
Blue Origin announced in a social media post July 17 that NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, mission will be the primary payload on the NG-2 launch, the second flight of New Glenn after its inaugural launch in January.
ESCAPADE was originally manifested on the first New Glenn for a launch scheduled in October 2024. However, NASA elected in early September to remove ESCAPADE from the launch after concluding that the rocket would not be ready in time before the mission’s launch window closed in late October.
The ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical smallsats, built by Rocket Lab for the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab, to study the interaction of the solar wind with the Martian magnetosphere. Unlike many Mars missions that must launch within a narrow window that opens only once every two years, the ESCAPADE mission has been studying complex trajectories that would enable launches outside of those windows, including options into the spring of 2026 that would enable an arrival at Mars in September 2027.
There were growing indications that ESCAPADE would launch on the second New Glenn. NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, released May 30, stated in a section about ESCAPADE that the agency was working on “establishing an updated schedule and cost profile to enable this mission to ride on the second launch of New Glenn,” with an anticipated launch date in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, or July to September 2025.
A NASA spokesperson, asked about that section of the budget proposal, confirmed June 5 that the launch window was the “current no earlier date when Blue Origin will be ready to launch ESCAPADE on New Glenn.”
Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a June 9 post that the company was targeting a launch of the NG-2 mission no earlier than Aug. 15, without disclosing the payload.
It’s unlikely, though, that the mission will be ready to launch by Aug. 15. Rocket Lab, the manufacturer of the ESCAPADE spacecraft, said July 17 the twin smallsats “are currently undergoing routine checkups and testing as they get ready for their return to Florida.”
For the first ESCAPADE launch attempt last year, Rocket Lab shipped the spacecraft to Florida for launch preparations in mid-August, about two months before the planned launch. A similar schedule for this attempt would mean a launch is unlikely before the latter half of September.
In addition to ESCAPADE, Blue Origin the NG-2 launch will carry a technology demonstration payload from Viasat as part of NASA’s Communications Services Project. Viasat announced in May an agreement with Blue Origin to demonstrate its InRange satellite-based launch telemetry service on two future New Glenn launches. The demonstration is intended to show how that commercial service can replace NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system for relaying launch telemetry as NASA works to retire TDRS in favor of commercial services.