Blue Origin Wins First NASA Contract for New Glenn Rocket

Blue Origin has landed its first NASA contract for the New Glenn rocket, a heavy-lift vehicle the company has spent years developing but has yet to fly. The space agency announced on February 9 that it selected New Glenn to launch the ESCAPADE mission—two small spacecraft designed to study Mars's magnetosphere—with liftoff scheduled for late 2024 and orbital insertion around Mars eleven months later.

The award comes as a task order under NASA's Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare program, a procurement vehicle the agency uses to secure launch services for smaller payloads. For Blue Origin, it represents validation of New Glenn's readiness from the nation's primary space agency, even though the rocket has never flown. The company has already secured substantial commercial business, including a deal with Amazon last April for twelve launches of Project Kuiper satellites, with options for fifteen additional flights.

The ESCAPADE mission itself has had a winding path to launch. NASA selected it in 2019 as part of its Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program, a series of cost-capped science missions designed to fly as secondary payloads aboard other rockets. Originally, ESCAPADE was supposed to ride along with the Psyche asteroid mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9. But in 2020, NASA switched Psyche to a Falcon Heavy to accommodate mission changes, and the resulting trajectory adjustment meant ESCAPADE could no longer reach Mars orbit as designed. The mission was suddenly stranded without a ride.

Rocket Lab stepped in. In 2021, the company announced it would redesign the ESCAPADE spacecraft for launch in 2024, a pivot that allowed the mission to survive. The redesigned spacecraft passed a critical review later that year, clearing the way for full development to proceed. Each of the two ESCAPADE spacecraft weighs roughly 120 kilograms without fuel—a modest payload by any measure. New Glenn, by contrast, is engineered to place forty-five metric tons into low Earth orbit, making it vastly oversized for this particular job. Neither NASA nor Blue Origin disclosed whether ESCAPADE will occupy the entire rocket or share it with other payloads, nor did they reveal the contract's financial value.

The ESCAPADE award underscores a broader challenge facing NASA's SIMPLEx program. The other two missions in the cohort have encountered their own launch complications. Janus, a pair of asteroid-studying spacecraft, was originally manifested on Psyche but had to be removed last November when Psyche's launch slipped from August 2022 to October 2023—a delay that meant Janus could no longer reach its target asteroids. The mission's principal investigator said in late January that his team is now hunting for alternative launch opportunities. Lunar Trailblazer, the third SIMPLEx mission, was moved from the IMAP space science mission to a lunar lander flight by Intuitive Machines scheduled for the second half of 2023. That change, combined with technical problems on the spacecraft itself, pushed Lunar Trailblazer's total cost to seventy-two million dollars.

ESCADADE's total cost, according to technical publications, stands at seventy-eight and a half million dollars, a figure that includes launch services and project reserves. The mission will study how Mars's magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind—a scientific question that has eluded easy answers. For Blue Origin, the contract is a milestone: proof that NASA trusts New Glenn enough to assign it a real payload, even if that payload could fit on something far smaller. For NASA, it is a solution to a problem that nearly killed a mission, and a hedge against the rideshare complications that continue to plague its smaller science efforts.