NASA Chooses Blue Origin To Send Mission To Mars, Defeat Elon Musk's SpaceX

Bill Neslon, while reviewing Blue Origin. (photo: @SenBillNelson)

JAKARTA - NASA announced on Wednesday, November 22, that two scientific rides will be delivered to Mars on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in August 2024, with a contract fee of US$20 million (Rp311.3 billion).

Initially, Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, was scheduled to carry this NASA payload on a Falcon Heavy rocket in October this year, along with NASA's Psyche mission to a asteroid.

However, the space agency withdrew additional probes from the launch as Falcon Heavy was unable to place it on the right track to put it into Mars orbit.

The announcement of this new schedule comes after Elon Musk's Starship rocket, which wants to be used to transport crews to the moon and finally Mars, exploded in a second launch attempt.

A pair of identical rides that form the NASA Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE) mission will be delivered using the untested Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, each carrying three experiments to investigate the effects of solar winds on the planet's magnetosphere.

This launch is part of NASA's broader efforts to use private contractors at lower costs to reach Mars.

"Through the use of lower mission certainty levels and commercial best practices for rocket launches, this very flexible contract helps expand access to space through lower launch costs," NASA's official statement on ESCAPADE.

NASA has been on frequent missions to our planet's neighbors to deliver orbiters, landers, and rovers, the latter in 2020 with Perseverance rovers and Ingenuity helicopters.

However, all of these missions were launched using NASA's own rockets. Blue Origin became the first private space company to be contracted by NASA to go to Mars.

The launch is likely to take place in August 2024, an agency official revealed at a meeting Monday, November 20.

NASA may take a big risk by sending interplanetary payloads using the New Glenn, as Blue Origin has yet to test the rocket launch.

"The price of the contract will reflect this level of risk," said Bradley Smith, director of NASA's Launch Service Office, in Monday's meeting, as reported by SpaceNews.com.

The ESCAPADE mission is categorized as a 'class D' mission, meaning its relatively low priority for NASA's overall strategy. This categorization also means the mission has low to middle national significance and should have low cost.

"We are willing to take a bit of a risk at the price and mission guarantee model that reflects the risk," Smith said, as quoted by Space News.

This is in accordance with ESCAPADE's very limited mission budget, only about $79 million.

The Blue Origin rocket was years late from schedule, which appears to affect the risk profile when announcing the launch date of 2024.

The ESCAPADE orbital pair will reach Mars after about 11 months and will start orbiting the planet.

The mission is part of NASA's plans to use commercial companies more to reach space, albeit at certain risks.

"By using lower mission certainty levels and commercial best practices for rocket launches, this very flexible contract helps expand access to space through lower launch costs," NASA officials wrote in a statement on ESCAPADE.

It remains to be seen if New Glenn will be ready to launch on time for the August launch window.

In 2021, the company announced its inaugural New Glenn launch target in the fourth quarter of 2022. Prior to that, the end of 2021 was the previous target to be achieved.

Until this article was published, the rocket had not made any flights. 'Of course there are some risks the schedule related to New Glenn has reached the launch, Smith said last Monday.