​The two EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission probes were supposed to be launched to Mars by the Falcon Heavy rocket together with the Psyche probe, but the delay of the Psyche mission forced NASA to look for another vehicle for EscaPADE. Although neither has yet flown, NASA has decided to assign Blue Origin and a New Glenn rocket to launch the two probes. Blue Origin requested an unexpectedly low price for this mission.

There are two interesting aspects of this collaboration between NASA and New Glenn: the price paid by NASA and the mass of the two probes compared to the mass that New Glenn can lift into orbit. So while the Falcon 9 launch costs somewhere between $60 and $70 million, NASA will only pay $20 million for EscaPADE, which is much less than we expected. In addition, the New Glenn rocket can lift 45 tons into low Earth orbit, while the mass of the two EscaPADE probes together with the mounting system in the rocket body will not even exceed 500 kilograms.

It’s not yet clear if this mission is entirely dedicated to NASA or if Blue Origin will launch other satellites for the occasion, but some rumors suggest that the launch price of New Glenn could actually be as high as $20 million, regardless of the client. Hard to believe considering that’s 3 times less than the launch price of the Falcon 9, and it’s already a relatively cheap rocket.

The EscaPADE launch, scheduled for late next year, will not be the first flight of the New Glenn rocket: Blue Origin is expected to conduct several test launches of the new rocket by then, but the launch is unlikely to happen. to 2024. As is often the case in this industry, the biggest delays are in engines. Blue Origin uses its own BE-4 engines for the New Glenn, which run on methane and liquid oxygen, but the same engines are also used in United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket (a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing).

And cooperation with the United Launch Alliance seems to be a priority, because the debut of the “Vulcan” is already planned for May 4, when the new rocket will send the Peregrine lander to the moon in its first launch. United Launch Alliance has already received several BE-4 engines, but the Vulcan only uses 2 such engines for the first stage, while the New Glenn requires 7 BE-4 engines for the first stage. Since these are new engines that appear to be still being tested, Blue Origin doesn’t seem to be able to produce these engines at a fast enough rate for both the Vulcan and New Glenn rockets.

The EscaPADE mission contains two identical probes, Blue and Gold, which will be sent into Mars orbit to help us better understand the interaction between the solar wind and the Martian atmosphere. The total budget of the mission is 80 million dollars, which is a relatively small amount for an interplanetary mission, the probes are built by Rocket Lab. An American company (which launches Electron rockets from New Zealand) has developed its own bus called the Photon, which can be adapted for interplanetary missions, and it is possible that in the future we will see the first private mission to Venus, a mission that will use such a Photon bus.

Initially, NASA planned that these EscaPADE probes would be launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket at the same time as the Psyche probe (which will be heading to the asteroid of the same name), but after the Psyche mission was postponed from July 2022 to October 2023, this was no longer possible: due to another the position of the planet Mars relative to Earth forced NASA to split the two missions and look for another option for EscaPADE.

Along with Japan’s H-3 rocket, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket, and America’s Vulcan and Starship rockets, New Glenn is one of the new heavy or super-heavy orbital launchers set to debut in the coming months (though not necessarily in 2023), but Interesting there will also be smaller-caliber rockets debuting this year: the German RFA One rocket (RFA company), the American Terran-1 rocket (Relativity Space company) or the return to the launch pad of the Firefly rockets. (Firefly Aerospace) or Rocket (Astra).

Currently, there are only 7 active probes in the orbit of Mars (the American probes Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN, the European probes Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter, the Arab probe Hope, the Chinese probe Tianwen-1), and on the surface the American rovers Curiosity and Perseverance (along with the Ingenuity helicopter), as well as China’s Zhurong rover, whose fate is unknown (it hasn’t communicated with Earth since last summer, and we don’t know if it’s in sleep mode or has become inactive).

In the future, NASA and ESA, as well as China, are planning missions to return samples of Martian soil to Earth, but this will not happen before 2030. Meanwhile, NASA plans to replace a fleet of aging Mars probes that are needed to communicate between future rovers and the Deep Space Network on Earth (Mars Odyssey has been operating since 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in Mars orbit since 2006).

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