{"id":282845,"date":"2025-11-14T00:30:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T00:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/282845\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T00:30:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T00:30:08","slug":"jeff-bezoss-blue-origin-launches-rocket-carrying-twin-nasa-spacecraft-to-mars-blue-origin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/282845\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin launches rocket carrying twin Nasa spacecraft to Mars | Blue Origin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blue Origin<\/a> successfully launched its huge New Glenn rocket on Thursday with a pair of Nasa spacecraft destined for Mars. It was only the second flight of the rocket that Jeff Bezos<\/a>\u2019s company and Nasa<\/a> are counting on to ferry people and supplies to the moon.<\/p>\n

The 321ft (98-meter) New Glenn blasted into the afternoon sky from the Cape Canaveral space force station, sending Nasa\u2019s twin Mars orbiters on a long journey to the red planet. Liftoff was stalled for four days by inclement local weather as well as solar storms strong enough to paint the skies with auroras as far south as Florida.<\/p>\n

In a first for the fledgling company, Blue Origin<\/a> recovered the booster following its separation from the upper stage and the Mars orbiters, an essential step to recycle and slash costs similar to how SpaceX rockets work. Company employees cheered wildly as the booster landed upright on a barge 375 miles (600km) offshore. An ecstatic Bezos watched the action from launch control.<\/p>\n

\u201cNext stop, moon!\u201d employees chanted following the booster\u2019s bull\u2019s-eye landing. Twenty minutes later, the rocket\u2019s upper stage deployed the two Mars<\/a> orbiters in space, the mission\u2019s main objective.<\/p>\n

The New Glenn\u2019s inaugural test flight in January delivered a prototype satellite to orbit, but failed to land the booster on its floating platform in the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

The identical Mars orbiters, named Escapade, will spend a year hanging out near Earth, stationing themselves 1m miles (1.5m kilometers) away. Once Earth and Mars are properly aligned next fall, the duo will get a gravity assist from Earth to head to the red planet, arriving in 2027.<\/p>\n

Once around Mars, the spacecraft will map the planet\u2019s upper atmosphere and scattered magnetic fields, studying how these realms interact with the solar wind. The observations should shed light on the processes behind the escaping Martian atmosphere, helping to explain how the planet went from wet and warm to dry and dusty. Scientists will also study how best to protect astronauts against Mars\u2019s harsh radiation environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really, really want to understand the interaction of the solar wind with Mars better than we do now,\u201d Escapade\u2019s lead scientist, Rob Lillis of the University of California, Berkeley, said ahead of the launch. \u201cEscapade is going to bring an unprecedented stereo viewpoint because we\u2019re going to have two spacecraft at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The relatively low-budget mission, coming in under $80m, is managed and operated by UC Berkeley. The Mars orbiters should have blasted off last fall, but Nasa passed up that ideal launch window \u2013 Earth and Mars line up for a quick transit just every two years \u2013 because of feared delays with Blue Origin\u2019s brand-new rocket.<\/p>\n

Named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the world, the New Glenn is five times bigger than Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rockets that send wealthy clients to the edge of space from west Texas. Blue Origin plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lunar lander on a demo mission in the coming months onboard the New Glenn.<\/p>\n

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Created in 2000 by Bezos, Amazon\u2019s founder, Blue Origin already holds a Nasa contract for the third moon landing by astronauts under the Artemis program. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX beat out Blue Origin for the first and second crew landings, using its Starship rocket, nearly 100ft (30 meters) taller than Bezos\u2019 New Glenn.<\/p>\n

But last month, Nasa\u2019s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, reopened the contract for the first crewed moon landing, citing concern over the pace of the Starship\u2019s progress in flight tests from Texas. Blue Origin as well as SpaceX have presented accelerated landing plans.<\/p>\n

Nasa is on track to send astronauts around the moon early next year using its own Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket. The next Artemis crew would attempt to land; the space agency is pressing to get astronauts back on the lunar surface by decade\u2019s end in order to surpass a Chinese mission to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Blue Origin successfully launched its huge New Glenn rocket on Thursday with a pair of Nasa spacecraft destined…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-282845","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}