The path to the next and second ever launch of a New Glenn mission got a lot closer to completion last night with the successful static firing of the ships main engines at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here in Central Florida.
Standing on a seaside launch pad, the New Glenn rocket ignited its seven BE-4 main engines at 9:59 pm EDT Thursday (01:59 UTC Friday). The engines burned for 38 seconds while the rocket remained firmly on the ground, according to a social media post by Blue Origin.
The hold-down firing of the first stage engines was the final major test of the New Glenn rocket before launch day.
Since early October, we've known the earliest launch window to be Sunday November 9th, with no time given, but the launch window runs until the 11th, so just two days. It will be worthwhile keeping an eye on the mission's NextSpaceflight page to see what launch time gets posted. Meanwhile we know the 9th is only a week away and this booster has been rolled back to its nearby hangar to have the two ESCAPADE satellites mounted and be readied for launch.
“Love seeing New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines come alive! Congratulations to Team Blue on today’s hotfire,” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, posted on X.
Blue Origin reported that the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust. CEO Limp went on to say:
We extended the hotfire duration this time to simulate the landing burn sequence by shutting down the non-gimballed engines after ramping down to 50 percent thrust, then shutting down the outboard gimballed engines while ramping the center engine to 80 percent thrust. This helps us understand fluid interactions between active and inactive engine feedlines during landing.
While it seems like a higher stakes gamble than the typical new rocket launch, Blue expects to recover this booster for reuse and re-fly it "early next year" to launch their first Blue Moon lunar lander to the Moon. If the landing and recovery should not be achieved, as happened on the first New Glenn mission, there isn't a "next New Glenn" available. That means the Blue Moon lander mission will have to wait while a new one is built and tested.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket fires up its seven BE-4 engines Thursday night. Credit: Blue Origin
Ars reporter Stephen Clark points out that NASA is getting a good deal and this flight is mutually beneficial for both NASA and Blue.
The space agency is paying Bezos’ company $20 million for the launch, millions less than a dedicated launch on another rocket. But there’s a trade-off. NASA is accepting more risk on this mission because it’s just the second flight of the New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force for high-priority government launches.
Officials are fine with that because ESCAPADE is part of a new family of relatively low-cost Solar System missions. The mission’s total cost amounts to less than $80 million, an order of magnitude lower than all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. At this cost, NASA managers can live with a little more risk than they would for an $800 million mission.
The strangest part of this mission, though, is in the details Clark provides.
Normally, Mars missions can launch from the Earth for only a few weeks about once every 26 months, when the planets are in the right position for a spacecraft to make a direct trip. ESCAPADE is launching outside of the normal Mars interplanetary window, so the twin probes will loiter relatively close to the Earth until next November, when they will fire their engines to set off for the red planet.
"Relatively close" means in a Sun-Earth L2 orbit, detailed at that link at the end of the previous paragraph. The Mission Design webpage says this will be the first mission ever to harness the Sun-Earth L2 orbit en route to Mars. That L2 point is what the James Webb Space Telescope is orbiting.
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