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A pair of Rocket Lab - made spacecraft are about to venture on a two - footstep journeying . The first stone’s throw is the 55 - hr , 2,500 - mile stretch from California to the launch website at Cape Canaveral . The second measure ? Just 11 months and 230 million miles to Mars .
The objective lens of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers ( ESCAPADE ) commission is to hit the books the interaction between solar wind and the Martian atmosphere . The University of California , Berkeley ’s Space Sciences Laboratory ( SSL ) developed the scientific load for the mission , but the satellite bus — the actual chopine that will move around through distance and host those load in an orbit around Mars — is all Rocket Lab . The mission is presently do to establish no originally than October on the first launch of Blue Origin ’s New Glenn rocket salad , fit in to NASA .
While the company is best known for its Electron roquette , which is second only to SpaceX ’s Falcon 9 in terms of launch numbers , the majority of its revenue really come from building and selling spacecraft and spacecraft component part . With ESCAPADE , Rocket Lab is search to show both the space means and the world that it can grow extremely high - performance spacecraft that are capable of journeying throughout the solar system .
The company proved itself oncewhen it built the satellite busfor NASA ’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment ( stretcher ) mission to the moon in 2022 . That spacecraft took a nearly five - month sojourn into abstruse space before move into lunar orbit . But have to Mars takes importantly longer — and historically , it ’s also been very , very expensive . Two late missions that sent orbiters around the Red Planet , the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005 and MAVEN in 2013 , each be NASA over a half billion dollars .
So in 2019 , the space agency base the Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration ( SIMPLEx ) program to fund small space vehicle mission into deep space . Like other NASA broadcast established in late years , it ’s also an effort on the part of the agency to embrace risk . Instead of spending $ 550 million on a mission into mysterious space , NASA set a finish to expend just one - tenth of that and hand each SIMPLEx mission a $ 55 million price pileus , turf out launching . ESCAPADE is one of three missions the agency take under the SIMPLEx plan , and in all likelihood , the first that will actually launch .
Those fund went to the principal investigator for the mission , SSL , who contracted Rocket Lab for the two satellite buses . Rocket Lab is n’t saying how much of that $ 55 million go to them , but the lead systems engineer for ESCAPADE , Christophe Mandy , said the company was “ two gild of magnitude cheaper than anything else . ”
The spacecraft , name Blue and Gold , are based on Rocket Lab ’s Explorer chopine ( which gain ground flight inheritance during stretcher ) , known for its high delta - Little Phoebe capability to corroborate missionary work of this kind . One of the biggest challenges for the Rocket Lab engineers was design a ballistic capsule that can get from Earth orbit all the direction to Mars ; for that intellect , the ESCAPADE ballistic capsule are about 70 % fuel by mass . That fuel will make the spacecraft capable of about 3 kilometre per second of delta - Phoebe , or switch in speed , which is very high for a artificial satellite of this sizing .
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The other expectant challenge is that Rocket Lab did n’t know the launching provider until relatively late into the design process , when NASA selected New Glenn in February 2023 . This unnamed dissemble what are called the “ driving constraints ” for the spacecraft , or the factors that shape the engine driver ’s design decisions .
“ Almost every individual spacecraft I ’ve ever seen has had launching vehicle as a drive constraint , but because we did n’t know what the launch vehicle was go to be , we did that other than , ” Mandy say . “ So we made an tremendous amount of effort to make it so that the launch vehicle was not [ a ] driving constraint , which is just very unusual . ”
Instead , Rocket Lab engineers ended up basing much of the ballistic capsule conception on another variable : the maximum amount of mass the spacecraft can take through a critical play call the Mars orbital insertion ( MOI ) , which is the manoeuvre the spacecraft will perform in deep space to enter Martian orbit .
“ So the amount of mass we have on the arrangement is driven by physics , rather than by something human being - made , like the launch vehicle , ” Mandy say . But once the launching fomite was pick out , “ we did n’t have to do the redesign , because our invention was driven by other requirements . ”
These constraints helped fight engineers to introduce . rather of a loge , the two spacecraft are basically “ cooler sandwiches , ” as Mandy called them , with two decks connected by struts , with the fuel tanks in the middle . Typically , the primary structure of a artificial satellite account for around 20 - 22 % of its total mass ; on ESCAPADE , thanks to the sandwich design , that number is just 12 % .
These change have escalating force , Mandy said : Less mass in the primary structure imply less fuel for that , which means a dissimilar army tank size of it , and so on . technologist also designed the space vehicle so that all the constituent that tend to get hot , like the flying computer and the receiving set , are near the one deck of cards of the spacecraft , while all the constituent that have a disposition to get cold-blooded , like the propulsion system , are near the other . These changes imply that the spacecraft will need less index , smaller solar panel , fewer heaters , and many other effects .
After launch , the spacecraft will pass 11 calendar month traveling to Mars before performing that critical MOI burn . But the sun will be between Earth and Mars when the ballistic capsule are expected to perform the burn , making well-timed communication with them impossible . Rocket Lab engineers will have to wait another three month or so before charge a program line to the spacecraft to start circularize its orbit . Then the ballistic capsule will collect and transmit scientific data back to Earth for around 11 months .
Mandy declined to say the precise launch windowpane for the mission , say that it ’s up to Blue Origin to determine , but he did say that now is the peak of efficiency for the ballistic capsule ’s travelling , and that window extends “ through several months after the peak . ” If Blue Origin misses the windowpane , the two fellowship and NASA will have to wait another 26 months until the ESCAPADE spacecraft can start unlock the secrets of Mars .
