NASA goes on an ESCAPADE – twin small, low-cost orbiters will examine Mars’ atmosphere

Christopher Carr, Georgia Institute of Technology and Glenn Lightsey, Georgia Institute of Technology Envision a time when hundreds of spacecraft are exploring the solar system and beyond. That’s the future that NASA’s ESCAPADE, or Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, mission will help unleash: one where small, low-cost spacecraft enable researchers to learn rapidly, iterate, and advance technology and science. The ESCAPADE mission launched on Nov. 13, 2025 on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, sending two small orbiters to Mars to study its atmosphere. As aerospace engineers, we’re excited about this mission because not only will it do great science while advancing the deep space capabilities of small spacecraft, but it also will travel to the red planet on an innovative new trajectory. The ESCAPADE mission is actually two spacecraft instead of one. Two identical spacecraft will take simultaneous measurements, resulting in better science. These spacecraft are smaller than those used in the past, each about the size of a copy machine, partly enabled by an ongoing miniaturization trend in the space industry. Doing more with less is very important for space exploration, because it typically takes most of the mass of a spacecraft simply to transport it where you want it to go.

Having two spacecraft also acts as an insurance policy in case one of them doesn’t work as planned. Even if one completely fails, researchers can still do science with a single working spacecraft. This redundancy enables each spacecraft to be built more affordably than in the past, because the copies allow for more acceptance of risk.

Studying Mars’ history

Long before the ESCAPADE twin spacecraft Blue and Gold were ready to go to space – billions of years ago, to be more precise – Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it does now. This atmosphere would have enabled liquids to flow on its surface, creating the channels and gullies that scientists can still observe today. But where did the bulk of this atmosphere go? Its loss turned Mars into the cold and dry world it is today, with a surface air pressure less than 1% of Earth’s. Mars also once had a magnetic field, like Earth’s, that helped to shield its atmosphere. That atmosphere and magnetic field would have been critical to any life that might have existed on early Mars.

ESCAPADE will measure remnants of this magnetic field that have been preserved by ancient rock and study the flow and energy of Mars’ atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, the stream of particles that the sun emits along with light. These measurements will help to reveal where the atmosphere went and how quickly Mars is still losing it today.

Weathering space on a budget

Space is not a friendly place. Most of it is a vacuum – that is, mostly empty, without the gas molecules that create pressure and allow you to breathe or transfer heat. These molecules keep things from getting too hot or too cold. In space, with no pressure, a spacecraft can easily get too hot or too cold, depending on whether it is in sunlight or in shadow. In addition, the Sun and other, farther astronomical objects emit radiation that living things do not experience on Earth. Earth’s magnetic field protects you from the worst of this radiation. So when humans or our robotic representatives leave the Earth, our spacecraft must survive in this extreme environment not present on Earth. ESCAPADE will overcome these challenges with a shoestring budget totaling US$80 million. That is a lot of money, but for a mission to another planet it is inexpensive. It has kept costs low by leveraging commercial technologies for deep space exploration, which is now possible because of prior investments in fundamental research. For example, the GRAIL mission, launched in 2011, previously used two spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, to map the Moon’s gravity fields. ESCAPADE takes this concept to another world, Mars, and costs a fraction as much as GRAIL. Led by Rob Lillis of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, this collaboration between spacecraft builders Rocket Lab, trajectory specialists Advanced Space LLC and launch provider Blue Origin – all commercial partners funded by NASA – aims to show that deep space exploration is now faster, more agile and more affordable than ever before.

How will ESCAPADE get to Mars?

ESCAPADE will also use a new trajectory to get to Mars. Imagine being an archer in the Olympics. To hit a bull’s-eye, you have to shoot an arrow through a 15-inch – 40-centimeter – circle from a distance of 300 feet, or 90 meters. Now imagine the bull’s-eye represents Mars. To hit it from Earth, you would have to shoot an arrow through the same 15-inch bull’s-eye at a distance of over 13 miles, or 22 kilometers. You would also have to shoot the arrow in a curved path so that it goes around the Sun. Not only that, but Mars won’t be at the bull’s-eye at the time you shoot the arrow. You must shoot for the spot that Mars will be in 10 months from now. This is the problem that the ESCAPADE mission designers faced. What is amazing is that the physical laws and forces of nature are so predictable that this was not even the hardest problem to solve for the ESCAPADE mission. It takes energy to get from one place to another. To go from Earth to Mars, a spacecraft has to carry the energy it needs, in the form of rocket fuel, much like gasoline in a car. As a result, a high percentage of the total launch mass has to be fuel for the trip. When going to Mars orbit from Earth orbit, as much as 80% to 85% of the spacecraft mass has to be propellant, which means not much mass is dedicated to the part of the spacecraft that does all the experiments. This issue makes it important to pack as much capability into the rest of the spacecraft as possible. For ESCAPADE, the propellant is only about 65% of the spacecraft’s mass. ESCAPADE’s route is particularly fuel-efficient. First, Blue and Gold will go to the L2 Lagrange point, one of five places where gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth cancel out. Then, after about a year, during which they will collect data monitoring the Sun, they will fly by the Earth, using its gravitational field to get a boost. This way, they will arrive at Mars in about 10 more months. This new approach has another advantage beyond needing to carry less fuel: Trips from Earth to Mars are typically favorable to save fuel about every 26 months due to the two planets’ relative positions. However, this new trajectory makes the departure time more flexible. Future cargo and human missions could use a similar trajectory to have more frequent and less time-constrained trips to Mars. ESCAPADE is a testament to a new era in spaceflight. For a new generation of scientists and engineers, ESCAPADE is not just a mission – it is a blueprint for a new collaborative era of exploration and discovery. This article was updated on Nov. 13, 2025 to reflect the ESCAPADE launch’s date and success. Christopher Carr, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Glenn Lightsey, Professor of Space Systems Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket landed its booster on a barge at sea – an achievement that will broaden the commercial spaceflight market

Wendy Whitman Cobb, Air University Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket successfully made its way to orbit for the second time on Nov. 13, 2025. Although the second launch is never as flashy as the first, this mission is still significant in several ways. For one, it launched a pair of NASA spacecraft named ESCAPADE, which are headed to Mars orbit to study that planet’s magnetic environment and atmosphere. The twin spacecraft will first travel to a Lagrange point, a place where the gravity between Earth, the Moon and the Sun balances. The ESCAPADE spacecraft will remain there until Mars is in better alignment to travel to. And two, importantly for Blue Origin, New Glenn’s first stage booster successfully returned to Earth and landed on a barge at sea. This landing allows the booster to be reused, substantially reducing the cost to get to space.

As a space policy expert, I see this launch as a positive development for the commercial space industry. Even though SpaceX has pioneered this form of launch and reuse, New Glenn’s capabilities are just as important.

New Glenn in context

Although Blue Origin would seem to be following in SpaceX’s footsteps with New Glenn, there are significant differences between the two companies and their rockets. For most launches today, the rocket consists of several parts. The first stage helps propel the rocket and its spacecraft toward space and then drops away when its fuel is used up. A second stage then takes over, propelling the payload all the way to orbit. While both New Glenn and Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s most powerful rocket currently available, are partially reusable, New Glenn is taller, more powerful and can carry a greater amount of payload to orbit. Blue Origin plans to use New Glenn for a variety of missions for customers such as NASA, Amazon and others. These will include missions to Earth’s orbit and eventually to the Moon to support Blue Origin’s own lunar and space exploration goals, as well as NASA’s. NASA’s Artemis program, which endeavors to return humans to the Moon, is where New Glenn may become important. In the past several months, several space policy leaders, as well as NASA officials, have expressed concern that Artemis is progressing too slowly. If Artemis stagnates, China may have the opportunity to leap ahead and beat NASA and its partners to the lunar south pole. These concerns stem from problems with two rockets that could potentially bring Americans back to the Moon: the space launch system and SpaceX’s Starship. NASA’s space launch system, which will launch astronauts on its Orion crew vehicle, has been criticized as too complex and costly. SpaceX’s Starship is important because NASA plans to use it to land humans on the Moon during the Artemis III mission. But its development has been much slower than anticipated. In response, Blue Origin has detailed some of its lunar exploration plans. They will begin with the launch of its uncrewed lunar lander, Blue Moon, early next year. The company is also developing a crewed version of Blue Moon that it will use on the Artemis V mission, the planned third lunar landing of humans. Blue Origin officials have said they are in discussions with NASA over how they might help accelerate the Artemis program.

New Glenn’s significance

New Glenn’s booster landing makes this most recent launch quite significant for the company. While it took SpaceX several tries to land its first booster, Blue Origin has achieved this feat on only the second try. Landing the boosters – and, more importantly, reusing them – has been key to reducing the cost to get to space for SpaceX, as well as others such as Rocket Lab. That two commercial space companies now have orbital rockets that can be partially reused shows that SpaceX’s success was no fluke. With this accomplishment, Blue Origin has been able to build on its previous experience and success with its suborbital rocket, New Shepard. Launching from Blue Origin facilities in Texas since 2015, New Shepard has taken people and cargo to the edge of space, before returning to its launch site under its own power.

New Glenn is also significant for the larger commercial space industry and U.S. space capabilities. It represents real competition for SpaceX, especially its Starship rocket. It also provides more launch options for NASA, the U.S. government and other commercial customers, reducing reliance on SpaceX or any other launch company. In the meantime, Blue Origin is looking to build on the success of New Glenn’s launch and its booster landing. New Glenn will next launch Blue Origin’s Blue Moon uncrewed lander in early 2026. This second successful New Glenn launch will also contribute to the rocket’s certification for national security space launches. This accomplishment will allow the company to compete for contracts to launch sensitive reconnaissance and defense satellites for the U.S. government. Blue Origin will also need to increase its number of launches and reduce the time between them to compete with SpaceX. SpaceX is on pace for between 165 and 170 launches in 2025 alone. While Blue Origin may not be able to achieve that remarkable cadence, to truly build on New Glenn’s success it will need to show it can scale up its launch operations. Wendy Whitman Cobb, Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.