Blue Origin has confirmed that the maiden flight of its heavy-lift rocket New Glenn to Mars will take place on October 13 at the earliest.
The space company, founded in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has so far only used the single-stage suborbital rocket New Shepard; the switch to the much more powerful and complex New Glenn is therefore a big step.
The rocket’s maiden flight will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and carry two identical spacecraft built by Rocket Lab for NASA’s Escapade mission. The spacecraft will collect data to learn more about how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and how that interaction causes the planet’s atmospheric escape.
Blue Origin’s confirmation of its intention to launch the rocket in October came just days after Bloomberg reported that the company had recently experienced two malfunctions during testing that resulted in damage to the New Glenn hardware planned for the rocket’s second and third flights.
The unwanted disruption increases the pressure on Blue Origin to have everything ready for October. If the launch window in the fall, when Earth and Mars are ideally aligned, is missed, there will be no chance of a launch for the next two years.
Despite the recent testing glitches, a Blue Origin spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company remains on schedule to launch the Mars mission this fall.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was launched for the first time from a Kennedy Space Center launch pad in February. The vehicle is about 98 meters tall and features a seven-meter-long payload fairing with twice the volume of standard five-meter-long class commercial launch systems. The company has described the fairing as “big enough for three school buses.”
The New Glenn is also scheduled to be used for up to 27 missions over several years to launch Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet satellite into space in an initiative similar to SpaceX’s Starlink service.
