Overview
- Blue Origin launched New Glenn from Cape Canaveral carrying NASA’s twin Escapade spacecraft, inserting them on a trajectory toward the L2 waypoint after weather, solar storm and regulatory delays earlier in the week.
- The rocket’s first stage touched down on the offshore barge Jacklyn roughly 600 kilometers off Florida, marking New Glenn’s first successful recovery after a failed attempt in January and months of refinements.
- Escapade will loiter near L2 before departing in the next Mars transfer window in late 2026, with both spacecraft targeted to enter Martian orbit in September 2027.
- The mission’s two identical probes will make simultaneous measurements of Mars’ upper atmosphere and patchy magnetic fields to reveal how the solar wind drives atmospheric escape and to inform future human exploration.
- Led by the University of California, Berkeley under NASA’s SIMPLEx program, Escapade is a low‑cost planetary mission budgeted under $100 million.