The space company Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, also founder of Amazon, managed to carry out a successful launch towards Mars this Thursday (13), with two NASA probes attached. An unprecedented milestone in this mission was the controlled recovery of a booster rocket, a feat previously achieved only by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The launch of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (Escapade) mission, composed of two identical satellites and transported by a Blue Origin rocket, took place from the Cape Canaveral Space Station, in the state of Florida at around 5 pm Brasília time.
The platform on which Blue Origin accomplished the feat is several hundred kilometers off the coast of Florida, and the first stage of the rocket landed on it, while the second continues towards Mars.
New Glenn was the rocket chosen to power the Escapade mission, which aims to study the interaction between the solar wind and the red planet’s magnetic field, which will provide scientists with essential information about how it lost almost all of its atmosphere.
Mars has a thin atmosphere, but, according to NASA research, it has lost much of its density, which may have caused the water the planet had at the time to escape into space. The mission will allow scientists to better understand space weather, which can protect astronauts and satellites as they orbit Earth and explore the solar system.
The Escape mission, made up of the Gold and Blue satellites, was supposed to be launched on Sunday, but bad weather prevented it. Rescheduled for Wednesday, it was postponed again due to a solar storm.
The mission will also test a new method for reaching Mars. Instead of using the traditional Hohmann transfer maneuver – which restricts launches to a window of a few weeks every 26 months – the mission will first head to a Lagrange point, a region of gravitational equilibrium located more than a million kilometers from Earth.
The milestone reached by New Glenn brings Blue Origin closer in its space competition with SpaceX, just a month after NASA’s interim director, Sean Duffy, said the company founded by Musk was late in reaching the Moon.
Duffy suggested that the government would open up the contract to send astronauts to Earth’s satellite to other companies, which would primarily benefit Blue Origin.
