Blue Origin Readies Second New Glenn Mission With Two Mars Cubesats Onboard
If all goes according to plan, Blue Origin will launch their New Glenn rocket for the second time tomorrow, Sunday, at 2:45 pm ET and land the first stage on a barge out at sea. New Glenn-2 is carrying two cubesats called ESCAPADE whose ultimate destination is Mars, though they will linger closer to Earth for the 12 months until the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens.
During a pre-launch press conference today, Laura Maginnis, Blue Origin Vice President for Mission Management for New Glenn, said the weather forecast is 65 percent favorable at the launch site, and sea-state conditions 375 miles off-shore where the landing barge is located are good, both for Sunday and for Monday if there’s a delay.
One difference for a Monday launch is that on Monday morning FAA restrictions go into effect for space launches and reentries due to air traffic controller staffing shortages because of the government shutdown. Airspace must be cleared for launches and reentries. They will be allowed only during the hours of 10:00 pm and 6:00 am local time, well outside the mid-afternoon NG-2 window, which is 2:45-4:13 pm ET tomorrow and 2:40-4:08 pm ET on Monday. She indicated they have approval from the Eastern Range for a Monday launch, but that doesn’t mean they can launch under the new rules. They’ll work with their NASA and FAA partners on “opportunities for exceptions” to the FAA policy if necessary.
For now, though, plans are proceeding for the launch tomorrow and the rocket is on the pad.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 8, 2025
Maginnis said Blue Origin’s primary objective is getting the twin ESCAPADE satellites on their way to Mars. They also hope to land the reusable first stage booster, GS-1, on the barge, which is named Jacklyn in honor of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’s mother. The New Glenn-1 launch in January was a success, but not the landing. Maginnis said the reason for the 10-month gap between that launch and this one is because they’ve been working on the landing system. However, if it doesn’t land this time, “that’s OK, we have several more vehicles in production.”
As for the main payload, NASA’s twin Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) Mars cubesats, they were supposed to launch as a rideshare on NASA’s Psyche mission in 2022. But Psyche was delayed and when it did launch in 2023, its revised trajectory wasn’t in the right direction for these probes and a new plan was needed.
UC Berkeley ESCAPADE Project Manager Dave Curtis characterized the mission as a marriage between NASA and New Space, with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center helping to manage the mission and providing the magnetometer, UC Berkeley managing the project and building the electrostatic analyzers, Embry Riddle making the Langmuir probe instrument, and Advanced Space producing “quite a number of mission designs” as it evolved. Rocket Lab designed and built the spacecraft and Vice President for Business Development and Strategy Richard French thanked UC Berkeley and NASA for putting their trust in Rocket Lab for this, their first science mission for the agency.
Curtis said the Rocket Lab and university portions of the project cost about $60 million, but deferred to NASA on total cost. NASA didn’t participate in the press conference because of the shutdown.
Spacecraft can be launched directly to Mars every 26 months when Earth and Mars are correctly aligned. The next such “Hohmann transfer” window isn’t until next November. Consequently, ESCAPADE will be sent to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point a million miles from Earth in the direction of Mars to loiter there until the window opens. Rocket Lab and UC Berkeley have studied the radiation effects and other consequences of the extended stay at L2 and are confident they won’t affect mission success. The spacecraft have a three-year design lifetime.
Once in orbit around Mars, the spacecraft — dubbed Blue and Gold — will study how the solar wind affects the Red Planet to help forecast the space weather environment for future robotic and human missions. UC Berkeley Principal Investigator Rob Lillis explained that at first Blue and Gold will follow each other in the same orbit, between two and 30 minutes apart, but later will be placed into different orbits to get a stereo view. Other probes orbiting Mars including NASA’s MAVEN, Europe’s Mars Express, and Japan’s upcoming Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission will be collecting data at the same time using other instruments that will allow a three-dimensional picture of the Mars magnetosphere.
Blue Origin’s live webcast begins 45 minutes before liftoff and continues until spacecraft separation.
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