Blue Origin has test fired its New Glenn rocket engine as it makes final preparations for the launch of NASA’s ESCAPADE mission involving twin Mars orbiters.
The static test fire of the heavy-lift rocket, captured by NASASpaceflight and shared below, lasted around 40 seconds and appeared to proceed without a hitch.
Hotfire complete!
New Glenn has performed a ~40 second firing of its 7 BE-4 engines at LC-36 tonight, outperforming NG-1 in duration by a significant margin.
Now we wait on word from Blue about the outcome!
📸 – @NASASpaceflight
📺 – https://t.co/pWsv50gmvY pic.twitter.com/AYy3B0BY3S
Blur Origin engineers will now be poring over the data in search of any anomalies. If everything’s in the clear, the rocket, on only its second-ever flight, could launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida as early as Sunday, November 9.
The New Glenn lifted off for the first time in January this year when it deployed a test payload for orbit-to-Earth communications. Footage of the launch showed the 98-meter-tall rocket leaving the launchpad, powered by seven BE-4 engines creating nearly four million pounds of thrust.
While the rocket performed as expected during its ascent, Blue Origin failed to land the returning first-stage booster on a droneship in the ocean as planned.
The company will try again in the upcoming mission, with engineers having implemented a number of updates to the landing system to improve the booster’s chance of a successful landing.
Bringing home the booster in a similar way to how SpaceX lands the first stage of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket allows for rapid reuse, drastically cutting the cost of spaceflight and thereby opening up space access to more companies and organizations.
NASA’s upcoming ESCAPADE mission, meanwhile, will use two identical spacecraft to explore how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment, and how this interaction causes Mars’ atmosphere to leak into space. The research could answer fundamental questions about Mars’ past and present habitability, and may also provide valuable information for future human missions to the red planet by identifying radiation risks and other potential challenges.
There’s much excitement around the launch as it’s the first dedicated Mars mission since 2020 when NASA sent its Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter to the distant planet, although no landing is involved this time around.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.