The passage of the first cold front that will dramatically change our weather has been predicted for a week so it's not much of a surprise but this afternoon's scheduled launch of the second New Glenn flight was scrubbed almost at the end of its two hour launch window this afternoon, due to the violation of the cumulus cloud rule of the weather squadron (pdf warning). The warning about cumulus clouds is intended to prevent flying into or above clouds that could help create a lightning strike.
This is an unusually cold front and the forecast is for the winds Monday at launch time to be North at 15 gusting to 20, and winds will be a little higher on Tuesday. The launch is currently scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 2:45 PM.
In the Halloween post about this mission, I mentioned the strange path this mission is taking. Part of the reasoning for that is to test out the concept of using the L2 point as a waiting point. It also can test the ability to put other ships in orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, and perhaps send multiple missions to Mars when we get the shorter flight missions that come roughly two years.
“ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re launching outside the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. We are using a very flexible mission design approach where we go into a loiter orbit around Earth in order to sort of wait until Earth and Mars are lined up correctly in November of next year to go to Mars.”
Currently, Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from Earth - we're closer to the midpoint between Hohmann windows than being near one - which means we're going to launch a couple of probes to Mars at the worst possible time, keep them in an orbit completely unrelated to where they're going and barely relatable to where they're coming from, taking on all the risks of life in deep space.
In the words of the famous meme: This Is Fine.
But there are several reasons this is perfectly OK to NASA. The New Glenn rocket is overkill for this mission. The two-stage launcher could send many tons of cargo to Mars, but NASA is only asking it to dispatch about a ton of payload, comprising a pair of identical science probes designed to study how the planet’s upper atmosphere interacts with the solar wind.
But NASA got a good deal from Blue Origin. The space agency is paying Jeff Bezos’ space company about $20 million for the launch, less than it would for a dedicated launch on any other rocket capable of sending the ESCAPADE mission to Mars. In exchange, NASA is accepting a greater than usual chance of a launch failure. This is, after all, just the second flight of the 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force.
As usual, this is summary of the source article, this time at Ars Technica, called "Here’s how orbital dynamics wizardry helped save NASA’s next Mars mission". It's worth a read for how it describes the way the kidney-bean shaped orbit works; the one around the L2 point published on the Friday before last.
New Glenn 2 on the way to the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station back on Oct. 8, 2025. It has been built up a bit more since this photo was taken. (Image credit: Blue Origin)
“ESCAPADE has identified that this is the way that we want to fly, so we launch from Earth onto this kidney bean-shaped orbit,” said Jeff Parker, a mission designer from the Colorado-based company Advanced Space. “So, we can launch on virtually any day. What happens is that kidney bean just grows and shrinks based on how much time you need to spend in that orbit. So, we traverse that kidney bean and at the very end there’s a final little loop-the-loop that brings us down to Earth.”
To tease the article a bit.
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