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Elon Musk once called Jeff Bezos a “dilettante” of space exploration, but the Blue Origin founder is poised to reach Mars before SpaceX.
NASA announced Wednesday that it will send two scientific spacecraft to the Red Planet aboard the first Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in August 2024, a contract that costs $20 million.
Initially, Musk’s SpaceX company was going to carry NASA’s payload on a Falcon Heavy rocket in October of this year, along with NASA’s Psyche mission, which was headed to an asteroid.
However, the space agency removed the additional spacecraft from the launch because the Falcon Heavy did not put them on the proper trajectory to insert them into Mars orbit.
The announcement of the new schedule comes shortly after Musk’s Starship rocket, the ship he wants to use to transport crews to the Moon and eventually Mars, exploded on a second launch attempt.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is part of a broader NASA initiative to use low-cost contractors to carry out missions to space. That can carry risks, the agency acknowledges
This launch is part of a broader effort by NASA to use private contractors to get to Mars more economically.
NASA announced in its ESCAPADE statement: “Each satellite will carry three instruments: a magnetometer to measure the magnetic field, an electrostatic analyzer to measure ions and electrons, and a Langmuir probe to measure plasma density and extreme ultraviolet solar flux.”
The US space agency has made a habit of stopping by our planetary neighbor to drop off orbiters, landers and rovers, most recently in 2020 with the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter.
But all of these missions have been carried out by NASA’s own rockets. Blue Origin enters the ring as the first private space company that NASA has contracted to go to Mars.
An identical pair of spacecraft that make up NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE) mission will ride on Jeff Bezos’ untested Blue Origin New Glenn rocket.
Elon Musk once called Jeff Bezos a “dilettante” of space exploration, but the Blue Origin founder is ready to reach Mars before SpaceX.
The launch will likely occur in August 2024, an agency official said at a meeting Monday.
NASA could be taking a big risk by sending an interplanetary payload on the New Glenn, as Blue Origin has yet to conduct a test launch of the rocket.
The price of the contract will reflect this level of risk, Bradley Smith, director of NASA’s Launch Services Office, said at a Monday meeting of the Human Exploration and Operations Committee of NASA’s Advisory Council, SpaceNews.com reported.
ESCAPADE is designated as ‘class D‘ mission, meaning it has a relatively low priority for NASA’s overall strategy. The designation also means that it has low to medium national importance and should be low cost.
“We’re willing to take some risk with a price and mission assurance model that reflects that risk,” Smith said, according to Space News.
It fits perfectly with the reduced budget of the ESCAPADE mission of only $79 million.
NASA’s decision is the latest chapter in the multibillion-dollar space race between Musk and Bezos, in which each company earlier this year won separate multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to go to the moon.
Blue Origin’s rocket is years behind schedule, which appears to take into account the risk profile when announcing this 2024 launch date.
The twin ESCAPADE orbiters They will reach Mars after about 11 months, when they will begin to orbit the planet.
This mission is part of NASA’s plan to use more commercial companies to reach space. Of course, this includes some risk.
“By using a lower level of mission assurance and best commercial practices for rocket launches, these highly flexible contracts help expand access to space through lower launch costs,” NASA officials wrote in a statement on ESCAPADE.
It remains to be seen whether the New Glenn will be ready in time for the August launch window.
In 2021, the company announced that it aimed fourth quarter of 2022 for the inaugural launch of New Glenn. Before that, the end of 2021 had been the target date.
At the time of publishing this article, the rocket has not yet taken off.
“There is certainly some schedule risk associated with New Glenn coming to the platform,” Smith said Monday.