The booster\u2019s first stage, called \u201cNever Tell Me The Odds\u201d by Blue Origin, shut down its seven BE-4 engines and separated from the upper stage a little more than three minutes after liftoff, then attempted a landing on Blue Origin\u2019s landing ship, Jacklyn, in the Atlantic Ocean. The stage performed a reentry and landing burn, touching down on the deck of Jacklyn 9 minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff.<\/p>\n
This was the first successful landing of the New Glenn first stage. The company attempted a landing on the inaugural launch, NG-1, but the stage\u2019s engines failed to relight.<\/p>\n
The primary payload for NG-2 was NASA\u2019s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of small satellites that will go to Mars to study space weather conditions there. The twin spacecraft separated about 30 seconds apart a little more than 33 minutes after liftoff, after a second burn of the New Glenn upper stage.<\/p>\n
The launch also carried a secondary payload from Viasat to test communications technologies for NASA\u2019s Communications Services Project, which aims to shift from NASA-run relay systems to commercial networks. That payload remained attached to the upper stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,\u201d Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a post-launch statement. \u201cIt turns out \u2018Never Tell Me The Odds\u2019 had perfect odds\u2014never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cToday was a tremendous achievement for the New Glenn team,\u201d Jordan Charles, vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said in the statement. \u201cWe\u2019ve made significant progress on manufacturing at rate and building ahead of need. Our primary focus remains focused on increasing our cadence and working through our manifest.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"NG-2](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/ng2landing.jpeg\")
The New Glenn first stage after landing on the NG-2 mission. Credit: Blue Origin webcast<\/p>\n
ESCAPADE and the goal of low-cost planetary science missions<\/p>\n
The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, Blue and Gold, were built by Rocket Lab. Each spacecraft, about a meter on a side, weighed 535 kilograms fully fueled at launch.<\/p>\n
Dave Curtis, ESCAPADE project manager, said at a Nov. 8 briefing that the mission team would spend the days after the launch commissioning the spacecraft. A key maneuver is scheduled for 14 days after launch to place the spacecraft on a trajectory to the Earth-sun L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.<\/p>\n
The spacecraft will be spending the next year loitering around the point in an orbit shaped like a kidney bean before returning to Earth in late 2026 for a maneuver to send the spacecraft to Mars. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in September 2027.<\/p>\n
Initial spacecraft operations will be handled by Rocket Lab at its Long Beach, California, facility, Curtis said. After commissioning is complete, spacecraft operations will shift to the University of California Berkeley.<\/p>\n
The launch is the culmination of years of effort to develop ESCAPADE. NASA selected the mission, along with the Janus asteroid flyby spacecraft and Lunar Trailblazer orbiter, in 2019 as part of its SIMPLEx line of low-cost planetary science missions.<\/p>\n
ESCAPADE was originally designed to go to Mars as a second payload on the launch of the Psyche asteroid mission. Changes in the flight plan for Psyche, including a switch from a Falcon 9 to a Falcon Heavy, no longer made it feasible for ESCAPADE to go into Mars orbit<\/a>.<\/p>\n The project redesigned the mission, working with Rocket Lab to develop the twin spacecraft<\/a>. NASA selected Blue Origin in early 2023 to launch the spacecraft on New Glenn<\/a>, a launch then planned for late 2024.<\/p>\n ESCAPADE was manifested on the first New Glenn, but NASA decided in September 2024 to remove the spacecraft from that NG-1 launch<\/a> because the rocket was unlikely to be ready in time before the launch window closed in late October. NG-1 launched in January 2025 with a Blue Origin demonstration payload that remained attached to the upper stage.<\/p>\n The rescheduled launch of ESCAPADE now, roughly halfway between traditional launch windows that are available only about every two years, was made possible through a revised trajectory developed by Advanced Space that will send ESCAPADE first to the Earth-sun L2 point<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThat L2 loiter planning drove a lot of risk assessment,\u201d said Richard French, vice president of business development and strategy at Rocket Lab, at a Nov. 8 briefing. That included assessment of additional maneuvers, the thermal environment and radiation exposure. \u201cAs a team, we agreed that risk was acceptable and within the capabilities of the spacecraft that we built.\u201d<\/p>\n Rob Lillis, principal investigator (PI) for ESCAPADE at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, said NASA also accepted a higher risk presented by the additional time in space, calling it \u201cconsistent with the Class D approach of this mission.\u201d Class D missions at NASA are willing to take more risk, trading that off typically with decreased costs.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is certainly a risk that we were willing to take given that we\u2019re going to be doing some great science,\u201d he added, noting the spacecraft have a design life of at least three years and the mission can achieve its science goals in one year at Mars.<\/p>\n That science involves studying space weather at Mars, including how the solar wind interacts with the planet\u2019s magnetosphere and atmosphere. The twin spacecraft will initially go into the same orbit around Mars, separated by between 2 and 30 minutes. Lillis said that will allow scientists to characterize changing conditions on much shorter timescales than previous missions have been able to do.<\/p>\n In the second phase of the mission, the two spacecraft will move into separate orbits. That will allow ESCAPADE \u201cto get that cause and effect, to see that real-time response to space weather events,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The data from ESCAPADE will offer an \u201cunprecedented stereo viewpoint\u201d on space weather at Mars, he said, which could help scientists understand how the planet lost its atmosphere and thus changed its climate. The data could also help planning for future robotic and human missions with better information about space weather conditions.<\/p>\n ESCAPADE is also a pathfinder for a different model for planetary missions. \u201cOur spacecraft, built in combination with this university PI-led mission,\u201d said French, \u201cdemonstrates the potential for decadal-class planetary science at a fraction of the traditional cost and on a much shorter schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a validation of the SIMPLEx program mission model using fixed-price contracting, and we do believe this can bring portfolio balance\u201d to NASA\u2019s planetary science division, he said.<\/p>\n ESCAPADE\u2019s cost is in the \u201c$60 million category,\u201d said Curtis, but deferred to NASA for the overall mission cost. NASA did not participate in the Nov. 8 briefing, organized by Blue Origin, because of the ongoing government shutdown. He said the launch delay from 2024 cost $5 million to $7 million.<\/p>\n A success for ESCAPADE would offset failures of previous SIMPLEx missions. Janus was canceled by NASA in 2023<\/a> when delays in the Psyche launch prevented Janus from carrying out its asteroid flyby mission. Lunar Trailblazer failed shortly after its launch in February<\/a>. Two earlier cubesat-class SIMPLEx missions, LunaH-Map and Q-PACE, also failed after their launches.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is just an amazing day,\u201d Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said before the Nov. 9 launch attempt on Blue Origin\u2019s webcast, noting the mission was the first NASA use of New Glenn as well as the first NASA Mars heliophysics mission. \u201cWe waited a long time for this.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Updated 7:10 p.m. Eastern with post-launch comments. WASHINGTON \u2014 Blue Origin successfully launched a NASA Mars mission on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[17179,17180,17181,79,722],"class_list":["post-290757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-blue-origin","tag-escapade","tag-new-glenn","tag-science","tag-sn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"ESCAPADE\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/escapade_twins_Mars.jpg\")
The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft will orbit Mars to study space weather conditions there. Credit: UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab<\/p>\n