Jeff Bezos’s rocket venture, Blue Origin, has set a date of no earlier than October 13 for the inaugural mission of the New Glenn rocket, with a payload set for Mars.
The announcement comes amid reports of several recent mishaps. In one incident, part of a rocket buckled due to a pressurization problem at the launcher’s hangar. In another, a tank failed unexpectedly during testing with explosive consequences.
The Register put these reports to Blue Origin, and a spokesperson told us that the company was constantly testing new hardware and configurations. “Those tests, including ones with anomalies, allow us to make our future hardware and systems more robust.
“We are ramping our production efforts up across the board and look forward to even more flights next year.”
The good news is that none of the “anomalies” have resulted in problems with the configuration the company plans to launch no earlier than October 13. The spokesperson added: “We continue to be on track to launch New Glenn this year and all flight hardware is complete.”
That said, things going bang this close to launch is a bit of a worry, and while the anomalies were not as fiery as what happened to RFA’s first stage at SaxaVord, nerves at Blue Origin and NASA might be be jangling. The first New Glenn is to carry a NASA smallsat mission to Mars, dubbed EscaPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers), which must be launched in a relatively tight window to reach the red planet.
The launch window for EscaPADE extends from October to November. A failure to get the mission heading to its destination will result in a two-year wait until Mars and Earth are aligned again to permit another try.
While a two-year delay might be a short amount of time to Blue Origin, considering that the company was founded in 2000 (SpaceX was founded in 2002) but has yet to reach orbit, failing to send EscaPADE on its way would be highly embarrassing for the Bezos-backed biz and potentially devastating for the NASA team behind the Mars mission.
The sub-orbital lobs of the New Shepard, which are impressive, pale when compared to the scale of the New Glenn. However, that increase in scale brings its own challenges, as evidenced by the repeated delays in getting New Glenn to the launchpad. It is difficult to see how having a maiden launch with a specific window can be doing anything but asking for trouble, and reports of mishaps and anomalies this close to lighting the blue touchpaper will only fuel speculation that Blue Origin is starting to feel the pressure of that looming launch date. ®
