Blue Origin Set For Space Launch After Repeated Delays
The planned launch has been repeatedly delayed over the past week: on Sunday over weather on Earth, and on Wednesday due to weather in space.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin will try once again on Thursday to launch its New Glenn Rocket.
The planned launch has been repeatedly delayed over the past week: on Sunday over weather on Earth, and on Wednesday due to weather in space.
When it eventually blasts off, the 322-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket will have the task of sending the US space agency NASA’s ESCAPADE twin spacecraft to Mars, in a bid to study the Red Planet’s climate history with the eventual hope of human exploration.
Thursday’s launch window opens at 2:57 pm (1957 GMT) and lasts 88 minutes.
The second postponement was over “highly elevated solar activity” that NASA was worried could impact its spacecraft.
The sun has recently been spewing charged particles that are interacting with Earth’s magnetic field, but the Space Weather Prediction Center said the geomagnetic storm was fading.
Closer to home, these space events have resulted in brilliant northern lights displays across the night sky in North America.
The New Glenn launch is due to proceed amid intensifying competition between Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The rival companies of billionaires Musk and Bezos are locked in a commercial space race that recently escalated, as NASA opened up bids for its planned Moon mission.
Blue Origin’s launch is to serve as a key test of whether it can achieve booster recovery, which would prove a technical breakthrough for the company if successful.
New Glenn’s inaugural flight in January was marked as a success, as its payload achieved orbit and successfully performed tests.
But its first-stage booster, which was meant to be reusable, did not stick to its landing on a platform in the Atlantic, and instead was lost during descent.
In its second effort, Blue Origin will try once more to recover the booster stage. Thus far, only Musk’s company SpaceX has managed that feat.
