New hopes for New Glenn
For Blue Origin’s second New Glenn rocket launch, there’s a lot at stake.
The first New Glenn rocket was launched successfully in Jan. after a decade of development. A second rocket launch is planned for no earlier than Nov. 9 from Cape Canaveral. The ship will carry ESCAPADE, a NASA mission tasked with studying Mars’ magnetosphere and weather.
Blue Origin plans for New Glenn’s first stage to be reusable for at least 25 flights once functioning properly. Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, says for this flight, it’s not a guarantee.
“The internal odds that I've heard that they're working on is a 75% chance of successfully landing the booster. For me personally, that seems really high, especially since they didn't get a lot of the atmospheric data,” Berger said. “I think that they're going to have to get more data before they successfully land one, but they're going to try, and I think that's exciting. I would put the odds at less than 50%, but fingers crossed that they succeed.”
SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on its 20th flight, with a semi-successful controlled landing into the ocean on its sixth flight. Considering Blue Origin’s high resources and using SpaceX as a model, Berger expected Blue Origin to be successful between its third and fifth flight.
“The company's number one priority, really, is getting new Glenn flying often,” Berger said. “If they want to reach any kind of a launch cadence, they need to land in this one, or, at worst, the next one, to really achieve, maybe half a dozen or more launches in 2026.”
The Artemis III contract was recently reopened by Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy after it had been awarded to SpaceX in April 2021. Duffy blamed SpaceX for a delay in the mission’s original timeline after its overall unsuccessful year of Starship launches. The opening could allow companies like Blue Origin to step in, but it’s not yet clear if it will do so.
Berger said that if New Glenn’s flight rate does not increase, they may not be a big factor in the Artemis III mission after all.
Amid the rush to put Americans back on the moon before China, the hunt for NASA administrator has heated up.
Duffy was nominated as acting NASA administrator in July by the Trump administration. This followed the abrupt withdrawal of commercial astronaut and tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman’s nomination, due to his “prior associations.” On Oct. 9, Bloomberg reported Trump met with Isaacman several times to rediscuss the role.
“It's clear Duffy wants to hold on to the job. He likes the publicity that NASA gets. But there's the people who would like to see an administrator who more deeply understands the problems with Artemis and NASA and probably would have more time to fix it, have been pushing for Isaacman,” Berger said. “It's really down to what the President decides to do.”
A mission to the red planet
Two twin spacecraft will catch a ride on Blue Origin’ s giant rocket, New Glenn, to Mars.
The ESCAPADE mission will launch on a mission to orbit the red planet and study how things like space weather impact Mars.
Amy Williams, an astrobiologist and associate professor at the University of Florida, said the main objective is to study the planet’s magnetosphere, or the space around the planet.
“The orbiters are actually meant to get into sort of a sequence where they can kind of process past each other as they're moving around Mars in their orbit,” Williams said. “This is actually going to enable them to make these really cool measurements about the magnetic field around Mars.”
Plus, the data gathered from these spacecraft could help scientists get closer to finding signs of ancient life on the surface of the planet. Williams said because the planet has lost its magnetic field and that loss has impacted the atmosphere, scientists can better understand this change and its impact up close with the twin orbiters.
“I think that any information that's returned about understanding the processes that control Mars's magnetosphere, how ions flow around the planet,” Williams said. “All of this is really helpful for us to understand sort of the billions of years of impact that solar winds have had on the planet.”
In other Mars news, Williams said the Curiosity rover on the red planet has been busy exploring craters for signs of water in the past, specifically Mount Sharp inside the Gale Crater.
“There’s this excitement that you know you're finally getting into the subsurface, into a place that we know water was flowing,” Williams said. “This must have been deep, I mean I don't have a constraint on how deep, but deep enough down that you're basically looking at a subsurface habitable environment in the ancient past. We know Gale crater was kind of filled up with sediments, so we do say that a lot about some of these were subsurface, but this is like this large-scale area that was clearly influenced by groundwater.”
On another area on Mars, the Perseverance rover is roaming what’s known as the Jezero Crater, looking at various rock and regolith. The crater has signs that ancient life may have existed there.
Williams said scientists have been particularly interested in studying breccias, a type of rock along the Jezero Crater.
“We’re really interested in exploring these kinds of rocks, because it's telling us about very early crust on Mars, what it was like, and it tells us a lot about how the planet evolved as a rocky body,” Williams said. “So, it's really cool to be sort of looking back so far in time to these rocks that are preserved on the crater rim.”
