CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – For only its second launch, the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket is now poised for liftoff on Nov. 9 after NASA’s twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars Orbiters were integrated with the rocket following a successful static fire test last week and the integrated stack was rolled out to pad 36.
Liftoff of the New Glenn-2 (NG-2) mission on a NASA ESCAPADE science mission is now targeted for Sunday afternoon Nov. 9 at 2:45 p.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Enjoy our upclose photos of NG-2 rocket taken at pad 36 by the Space UpClose team of Ken Kremer and Jean Wright on Nov. 8.
The long delayed flight dubbed New Glenn-2 (NG-2) is tasked with launching NASA’s twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars Orbiters to the Red Planet to study the solar wind’s interaction with Mars and its weak magnetic field and how it strips away and depletes the atmosphere
The first New Glenn rocket finally launched in Jan 2025 after much delay on a mostly successful maiden mission
The $80 million ESCAPADE mission will be New Glenn’s first interplanetary launch on only its second mission
The NG-2 mission will launch on an easterly direction and slightly southeast from the Cape
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The New Glenn first stage is designed to recovered for reuse but that did not succeed on the maiden mission.
Blue Origin is working hard for a successful droneship touchdown of the 189-foot-tall (58-meter-tall) booster on their Jacklyn droneship on the second liftoff
Following stage separation, the first stage autonomously descends toward Jacklyn, a landing platform located several hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic near the Bahamas.
If all goes well Jacklyn will then return to Port Canaveral with the booster on top
The upper stage is powered by two BE-3U engines which ignite to propel ESCAPADE to destination Mars
ESCAPADE has a wide launch window where it can reside in Earth orbit or the L2 Lagrange point before targeting Mars – that is not restricted to just a few weeks as is the case for most interplanetary missions, and explains why the probes can be launched over a wide time period.
“ESCAPADE does not face the narrow launch windows typical of other Mars missions. A team at Advanced Space, a company supporting the mission, developed multiple trajectories where ESCAPADE could loiter in Earth orbit or around the Earth-sun L2 Lagrange point before heading to Mars in 2026.
That approach allows ESCAPADE to launch “virtually any day” this year, the overall mission PI told me in an informal interview last week
“It’s been a long road, but we are so excited to be launching Blue & Gold on their mission to understand the Martian space weather environment,” Rob Lillis, principal investigator for ESCAPADE at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, said in a Rocket Lab statement about the arrival of the spacecraft at the launch site.
The ESCAPADE spacecraft were built by Rocket Lab
“The ESCAPADE spacecraft arrived at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility in Titusville, Florida, on Sept. 16 from Rocket Lab’s Spacecraft Production Complex and headquarters in Long Beach, California, where it was designed, built, and tested.”
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Ken Kremer interviews about New Glann-2 mission at CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox 35 Orlando
https://www.wesh.com/article/blue-origin-new-glenn-prepares-for-launch/69291243
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