Blue Origin has confirmed that it’s focusing on no sooner than October 13 for the maiden flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket in a mission sure for Mars.
The spaceflight firm, arrange in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has so far solely flown the single-stage suborbital New Shepard rocket, so the transfer to the significantly extra highly effective and sophisticated New Glenn is a giant one.
The rocket’s inaugural flight will carry off from the Kennedy Area Middle in Florida, launching two similar spacecraft constructed by Rocket Lab for NASA’s Escapade mission. The spacecraft will collect knowledge to study extra about how the photo voltaic wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic atmosphere, and the way this interplay drives the planet’s atmospheric escape.
Blue Origin’s affirmation of its intention to get the rocket airborne in October got here simply a few days after Bloomberg reported that the corporate just lately suffered two failures throughout testing, which triggered injury to New Glenn {hardware} slated for the rocket’s second and third flights.
The undesirable disruption piles on the strain for Blue Origin to have all the things prepared for October as a result of if it misses the autumn launch window when Earth and Mars are ideally aligned, there gained’t be one other likelihood to launch for an additional two years.
Regardless of the latest testing mishaps, a Blue Origin spokesperson instructed Bloomberg that it’s nonetheless on monitor to launch the Mars mission this fall.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was raised for the primary time on a Kennedy Area Middle launchpad in February. The automobile stands at about 320 toes (98 meters) tall, and features a seven-meter payload fairing with twice the amount of normal five-meter class industrial launch methods. The corporate has described the fairing as being “giant sufficient to carry three college buses.”
The New Glenn may also be used for as much as 27 missions to deploy Amazon’s Challenge Kuiper web satellites over plenty of years in an initiative just like SpaceX’s Starlink service.
