Blue Origin has confirmed that it is targeting no earlier than October 13 for the maiden flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket in a mission bound for Mars.
The spaceflight company, set up in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has up to now only flown the single-stage suborbital New Shepard rocket, so the move to the considerably more powerful and complex New Glenn is a big one.
The rocket’s inaugural flight will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, launching two identical spacecraft built by Rocket Lab for NASA’s Escapade mission. The spacecraft will gather data to learn more about how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment, and how this interaction drives the planet’s atmospheric escape.
Blue Origin’s confirmation of its aim to get the rocket airborne in October came just a couple of days after Bloomberg reported that the company recently suffered two failures during testing, which caused damage to New Glenn hardware slated for the rocket’s second and third flights.
The unwanted disruption piles on the pressure for Blue Origin to have everything ready for October because if it misses the fall launch window when Earth and Mars are ideally aligned, there won’t be another chance to launch for another two years.
Despite the recent testing mishaps, a Blue Origin spokesperson told Bloomberg that it’s still on track to launch the Mars mission this fall.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was raised for the first time on a Kennedy Space Center launchpad in February. The vehicle stands at about 320 feet (98 meters) tall, and includes a seven-meter payload fairing with twice the volume of standard five-meter class commercial launch systems. The company has described the fairing as being “large enough to hold three school buses.”
The New Glenn will also be used for up to 27 missions to deploy Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet satellites over a number of years in an initiative similar to SpaceX’s Starlink service.
