Blue Origin Set to Launch New Glenn Rocket on November 9
By Jim Siegel
All eyes will be on Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday November 9, 2025. Blue Origin's New Glenn heavy lift rocket will attempt to successfully launch NASA's ESCAPADE mission to an orbit around Mars.
But it won't be the first mission for New Glenn. Back in January 2025, on its maiden voyage New Glenn successfully put a prototype Blue Ring spacecraft into MEO (medium earth orbit), though it's first stage was lost in an attempt to recover it on a drone landing ship in the Atlantic.
According to NASA, ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission aims to investigate Mars' magnetoshere and a technology demonstration payload from Viasat. According to UC Berkley, two identical spacecraft will fly in formation to map the magnetic fields, upper atmosphere and ionosphere of Mars in 3D, providing the first stereo view of the Red Planet's unique near-space environment. What they find will help scientists understand how and when Mars lost its atmosphere and provide key information about conditions on the planet that could affect people who land or settle on Mars. NASA reportedly paid Blue Origin about $20 million for the launch.
Blue Origin has at least four more missions scheduled for New Glenn. The first of these four is scheduled for this coming January, intended to put a prototype Blue Moon Mark 1 lander on the Moon. During the mission Blue Moon will carry a payload called Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS). If all goes well with the ESCAPADE launch and first stage recovery, the Blue Moon mission will use the same first stage booster, dubbed Never Tell Me The Odds.
According to ESCAPADE principal investigator Robert Lillis of UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), aside from its main missions, ESCAPADE will also pioneer a new route or trajectory to Mars. Typically, missions to Mars are launched within a tight window — just a few weeks long every 26 months — that allows the spacecraft to take the most fuel-efficient route: an elliptical path that allows the spacecraft to exit Earth's orbit and insert into Mars' orbit at just the right time to catch the Red Planet as it hurtles by. Trajectories typically take between seven and 11 months. All Mars missions up to now have used this route, called a Hohmann Transfer, which has restricted launches to this once-every-two-years alignment between Earth and Mars.
ESCAPADE will instead head first to a Lagrange point — a place where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth are equal — and loop around it in a lazy, 12-month kidney bean-shaped orbit that eventually brings it back toward Earth in early November 2026. At its closest approach, ESCAPADE will fire its engines to slingshot around Earth and head out to meet Mars during its biannual alignment with Earth.
“If humans plan to settle Mars in the future, hundreds to thousands of crewed and uncrewed ships will need to head out during every alignment,” Lillis said. “Since Earth has a limited number of launch pads and weather and technical delays are common, the flexible trajectory ESCAPADE will pioneer could allow all these spacecraft to launch over many months, "queueing up" before zipping off to Mars during the planetary alignment.”
“Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned? ESCAPADE is paving the way for that,” said Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space LLC, one of NASA's partners on ESCAPADE, at a conference earlier this year.
How does this new entry New Glenn compare to the proven SpaceX heavy lift rocket, the Falcon Heavy? According to New Space Economy, at 322 feet tall New Glenn (NG) would tower over the SpaceX Falcon Heavy (FH) at 230 feet. The payload fairing diameter of NG is also greater at 23 feet, compared to 17 feet for the FH. But the FH has greater payload capacity. For example, the FH payload to GTO is about 20,000 kg, compared to the 13,000 kg for NG.
On the other hand, the massive SpaceX Starship is 22 meters taller then NG and 2 meters wider.
In any case, with a successful launch on Sunday, Blue Origin will have a proven entry into the American arsenal of commercial rockets, joining SpaceX and the ULA Vulcan (which had its maiden flight in January 2024).
