New Glenn's First Launch by Mid-October?

The industry and tons of pundits have been talking about Blue Origin's New Glenn for years and the observation that it still hasn't made Low Earth Orbit. Despite that, there has been a noticeable move toward more hardware in the last year. Are we about to see the first attempt to fly a mission of the heavy lift rocket? It seems the story from last April that we'd see the first launch on September 29th might have been on the money - or no later than mid October. 

The reason is that New Glenn is to launch a pair of identical satellites to Mars and one of those launch windows timed to get the shortest travel time to Mars is coming up.  

The launch period opens on September 29. The two identical Mars-bound spacecraft for the ESCAPADE mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, are now complete. Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass.

Wait... Rocket Lab built them? The company launching small satellites on their Electron rocket while they develop the heavier-lift Neutron?  That just became the fastest company in history to make it to orbit 50 times?

Rocket Lab designed, built, and tested the two ESCAPADE spacecraft in a little more than three years. This is relatively fast for an interplanetary science mission. NASA selected the ESCAPADE mission for development in 2019 as part of a new class of small planetary science missions in which scientists can propose concepts for modest probes to explore the Solar System.

The Escapade mission was originally supposed to be launched as a piggyback payload with NASA's Psyche asteroid mission in 2022, but NASA switched that to launching on a Falcon Heavy. That shifted the Psyche launch to October 2023, and forced a redesign of the ESCAPADE pair of spacecraft. 

"So that was the first thing, and then there were certainly challenges on the Rocket Lab side," Lillis told Ars. "The thruster changed. There were also significant problems getting the tanks delivered ... so they really went into hero mode. They went and actually spun up an entire internal 3D tank-printing capability from nothing. Once things started looking shaky with this tank supplier, they came through.

"Those printed tanks are on the spacecraft, and they're all qualified, etc. So that was a huge win," he said. "That could have totally been a mission killer, the tank issue."

The name quoted, Lillis, is Rob Lillis, the ESCAPADE mission's lead scientist from the University of California Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory. 

After the pretty serious Reset when the launch vehicle and mission concept changed, getting the two flight-ready satellites ready in just over three years is impressive. 

As Rocket Lab went into "hero mode," to borrow Lillis' term, it's now Blue Origin's turn to go into full hero mode. A lot of important things that should be tested before trying to launch a mission like this still have to be tested. They've put the New Glenn on the launch pad but they haven't done a wet dress rehearsal in which they fully fuel the rocket and check out all of that system, and they haven't done a static firing of their BE-4 methane/oxygen engines to fully test the fuel delivery system and the engines on that booster.  They have filled the New Glenn with liquid nitrogen, one of the first tests SpaceX does on their Starships and Super Heavy boosters, commonly called a cryo or cryogenics test.

As Stephen Clark at Ars Technica points out, even a heavy lift vehicle the size of New Glenn has to follow the prescribed launch window. At some point in late October or early November, that launch window closes and the two year wait for the next launch window starts ticking.

The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California. Image credit: Rocket Lab.