Blue Origin, the private space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was awarded its first interplanetary NASA contract on Thursday to launch a mission next year to study the magnetic field around Mars, the U.S. space agency and company said, Trend reports citing Reuters.
Plans call for Blue Origin's recently developed New Glenn heavy-lift rocket to blast off with NASA's dual-spacecraft ESCAPADE mission in late 2024 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the agency said.
It will take the identical twin ESCAPADEs, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, about 11 months to reach Mars orbit, where they will capture data from the planet's magnetosphere and its interactions with solar radiation.
New Glenn, with a reusable first stage designed to be flown on at least 25 missions, is named for pioneering NASA astronaut John Glenn, who became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.
Blue Origin has flown previous NASA missions with its smaller, suborbital New Shepard rocket, which can carry research payloads on short, microgravity trips to the edge of space and back.