Aerospace company Blue Origin, founderwhich is the American billionaire Jeff Bezos (Jeff Bezos), received the first big government contract. Its rocket will be used in a research mission to Mars.
What is known
National Aeronautics Administration andNASA is working on the ESCAPADE mission, in which the agency wants to study the Red Planet's magnetosphere. NASA will use Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft.
ESCAPADE is scheduled to launch in 2024.NASA is using the New Glenn rocket, which doesn't exist yet. It is a more powerful version of the New Shepard rocket and was announced back in 2016 as a competitor to the Falcon Heavy, but something went wrong, as we see.
Blue Origin originally planned to makefirst flight of New Glenn at the end of 2021, but it has been delayed. Later, a new date was chosen - the last quarter of 2022. But the Jeff Bezos company again failed to realize its plan.
By the way, NASA is not the only organizationwhich wishes to use the New Glenn booster. Amazon has ordered a dozen launches from Project Kuiper. And today we wrote that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed Amazon to put into orbit more than 3,000 Internet satellites.