Sending anything to Mars is a much more difficult process than it seems. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union tried (and failed) in its first nine consecutive attempts, and the US was only able to succeed in quick flybys. The losing streak came to an end in 1971 with the success of the Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. 

More than 50 years later, Mars is still tough to get to, with only seven functional orbiters and two on-surface rovers still operating, most of which are run by NASA. 

On Sunday, NASA’s Escapade, a collaborative effort among the space agency, UC Berkeley and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, will launch and attempt to add two more orbiters to the elusive club of successful missions to Mars. Liftoff is scheduled for 2:45 p.m. ET.

The mission is simple on paper: Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket will launch two Escapade orbiters into space on Nov. 9, depending on the weather and other factors.

Once there, the orbiters — nicknamed Blue and Gold after UC Berkeley’s school colors — will separate. This is where things get a little complicated. Blue and Gold will hang out at the L2 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, a part of space behind the Earth when viewed from the sun, where the orbiters can quite literally hang out without getting lost in space. They’ll stay there for a year before doing a quick flyby of Earth and departing for Mars. The twin orbiters are expected to arrive at the Red Planet by November 2027. 

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Space agencies launch missions all the time but few of them have the subtext of Escapade, which has not one but three underlying storylines to pay attention to. 

New Glenn’s official debut

NASA has tapped Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket for the launch. New Glenn is the proverbial new kid on the block, and the Escapade mission will be the company’s first official mission into space. The rocket’s role will be to launch Escapade into orbit and then return to Earth.

Blue Origin sent New Glenn into orbit for the first time in January 2025. That mission, dubbed NG-1 by Blue Origin, showed that the rocket could launch and make it to space while demonstrating the company’s Blue Ring orbital transfer vehicle. Things didn’t exactly go as planned, however. Upon reentry, New Glenn’s first stage was unable to stick its landing, missing its target and plunging into the Atlantic Ocean, prompting an FAA investigation. 

For the Escapade mission, all eyes will be on whether Blue Origin will do better this time in the landing phase. Not only is this the first NASA mission for the space company, owned by the CEO of online retail giant Amazon, but it will also make its second attempt to land New Glenn’s first-stage rockets without incident. 

Should the company succeed, Blue Origin will join Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the only commercial vendors with reusable space launch vehicles. This could help reduce the cost and increase the frequency of space launches. 

The 13 lives of Escapade

One of the challenges of the Escapade mission is its budget. Missions to Mars are usually expensive. The Mars Exploration Rover mission started in 2003 and launched a year later cost a hair over $1 billion, with $744 million of it going to vehicle design and launch. Even less expensive initiatives, like the failed 1999 Mars Polar Lander, still cost well north of $100 million. 

Escapade didn’t have that budget. It’s part of NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. Its budget was less than $80 million, and to build the two orbiters, UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab were allocated $55 million of that total. 

«Building two interplanetary spacecraft for $55 million was never going to be simple,» Dr. Robert Lillis, associate director for Planetary Science at UC Berkeley and the Escapade mission, tells CNET. «They say ‘space is hard’ and they’re right. For us and our spacecraft partners at Rocket Lab, it was tough to build robust, well-instrumented interplanetary probes on a low budget, so challenges were many.»

Researchers at Berkeley began work on Blue and Gold in 2016, and over the years, they dealt with myriad roadblocks, including budgetary concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply issues from suppliers and even personal illnesses. 

«I’ll put it this way, we have a slide deck called ‘The Nine Lives of Escapade’ and I think we’re up to 13 now,» Lillis says. «I could write a book on all the things that could’ve doomed the mission.»

The cost of admission

In 2013, the Indian Space Research Organization launched its Mars Orbital Mission, a successful attempt to put a satellite on the Red Planet. The total cost of the mission was $74 million, which undercut all other missions to Mars by a fairly significant margin when adjusting for inflation. 

Escapade’s budget is roughly the same, with NASA paying Blue Origin $20 million for use of the New Glenn rocket in addition to the $55 million given to UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab for the creation of the two orbiters. Should the mission be a success, it’ll be NASA’s first low-cost mission to go as far as Mars, and the second such mission to succeed.

Reducing the cost of admission is an important milestone for NASA. It would open up more opportunities for future Mars missions, which could help pave the way for human exploration someday, although there are many other milestones that need to be hit before that can happen.

UC Berkeley and Rocket Lab successfully developed two orbiters that will spend their lifetimes scanning Mars’ magnetic field to gain a deeper understanding of its history, all while operating within a budget that may make future missions to Mars more frequent and affordable. 

The Martian magnetosphere

Despite being one of Earth’s closest neighbors, there are still a lot of question marks surrounding Mars. It’s pretty well established that the planet had water at some point. Over the span of its history, the Martian magnetosphere started getting stripped away by solar winds, making it nearly impossible for water to continue to exist. 

Science has a limited set of data that comes from single orbiters over the span of decades and Escapade hopes to fix that by having two orbiters that follow each other so that researchers can get more consistent measurements of the Martian magnetosphere. As Lillis says, the magnetosphere on Mars changes by the minute, so waiting for a single orbiter to circle back around leaves a lot of those changes unmeasured. 

«With a single orbiter, we could measure conditions in the upstream solar wind, but then have to wait a couple of hours before the spacecraft orbit brought us into the upper atmosphere to measure the rates of atmospheric escape,» Lillis said. «That’s too long: We know the space weather propagates through the system in only one or two minutes.»

The ultimate purpose of the mission is to measure and observe how solar weather interacts with the Martian magnetosphere. Per Lillis, solar winds have been eroding the magnetosphere on Mars, similar to how water erodes rock in a river. Escapade will help science determine how fast and how much of the magnetosphere has eroded under the sun’s constant onslaught. 

Because space weather can be so unpredictable and the existing data is spread out too far in terms of time, researchers aren’t quite sure what they’re going to find when they get there. Berkeley has simulation models that can predict things over the span of hours. Lillis says that the data from Escapade’s two-orbiter setup will help fill in a lot of those gaps.

«With Escapade, we can measure cause and effect at the same time, i.e., the solar wind and upper atmosphere simultaneously,» says Lillis. «To start to understand this highly dynamic system, we need that cause and effect perspective.» 

You can watch the livestream of the Escapade mission launch on Sunday, at Blue Origin’s website.

TP-Link routers might not be available for much longer in the US, according to a Washington Post report last week. A potential ban is looking increasingly likely, as more than half a dozen federal departments and agencies back the proposal,

The news first broke in December of last year, when The Wall Street Journal reported that investigators at the Departments of Commerce, Defense and Justice had all opened probes into the company due to national security risks stemming from its ties to China. Since then, news on the TP-Link front has been relatively quiet.

Now, the proposal has gained interagency approval.

Read more: I Asked 4 Cybersecurity Experts If They Would Still Use a TP-Link Router

Why are plans to ban TP-Link routers being pushed?

«Commerce officials concluded TP-Link Systems products pose a risk because the US-based company’s products handle sensitive American data and because the officials believe it remains subject to jurisdiction or influence by the Chinese government,» the Washington Post reported. 

TP-Link’s ties to the Chinese government are only allegations. The company — technically called TP-Link Systems — has strenuously denied to me in the past that it’s a Chinese company. 

«As an independent US company, no foreign country or government, including China, has access to or control over the design and production of our products,» a TP-Link spokesperson told CNET.

The history of the TP-Link routers

TP-Link was founded in Shenzhen, China, in 1996 by two brothers, Jeffrey (Jianjun) Chao and Jiaxing Zhao. In October 2024, two months after members of the House Select Committee called for an investigation into TP-Link routers, the company split into two: TP-Link Technologies and TP-Link Systems.

The latter is headquartered in Irvine, California, and has approximately 500 employees in the US and 11,000 in China, according to the Washington Post report. TP-Link Systems is owned by Chao and his wife. 

«TP-Link’s unusual degree of vulnerabilities and required compliance with [Chinese] law are in and of themselves disconcerting,» the lawmakers wrote in October 2024. «When combined with the [Chinese] government’s common use of [home office] routers like TP-Link to perpetrate extensive cyberattacks in the United States, it becomes significantly alarming.»

The company has become a dominant force in the US router market since the pandemic. According to the Journal report, it grew from 20% of total router sales in 2019 to around 65% this year. TP-Link disputed these numbers to CNET, and a separate analysis from the IT platform Lansweeper found that 12% of home routers currently used in the US are made by TP-Link. More than 300 internet providers issue TP-Link routers to their customers, according to the Wall Street Journal report. 

Why are TP-Link routers being investigated?

Separately, the Department of Justice’s antitrust division is investigating whether TP-Link engaged in predatory pricing tactics by artificially lowering its prices to muscle out competitors. 

CNET has several TP-Link models on our lists of the best Wi-Fi routers and will monitor this story closely to see if we need to reevaluate those choices. 

«We do not sell products below cost. Our pricing is not only above cost but contributes a healthy profit to the business,» a TP-Link spokesperson told CNET. 

The potential ban has been through an interagency review and is currently in the hands of the Department of Commerce. According to the Washington Post report, sources familiar with the details of the ban said the Trump administration’s ongoing negotiations with China have made the chances of a ban less likely in the near future. 

«Any concerns the government may have about TP-Link are fully resolvable by a common-sense mix of measures like onshoring development functions, investing in cybersecurity, and being transparent,» the spokesperson said. «TP-Link will continue to work with the US Department of Commerce to ensure we understand and can respond to any concerns the government has.»

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How worried should you be about your TP-Link router?

I wrote a few months ago that I wasn’t in any rush to replace my own TP-Link router, and that’s essentially how I still feel today. 

When the news first broke last December, I asked four cybersecurity experts whether they would still use a TP-Link router. One gave a strong «no.» Another said there is «risk for a consumer.» And two declined to answer the question directly. 

Itay Cohen was one of the authors of a 2023 report that identified a firmware implant in TP-Link routers linked to a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group. He told me in a previous interview that similar implants have been found on other router brands manufactured all over the world.

«I don’t think there’s enough public evidence to support avoiding routers from China outright,» Cohen said. «The vulnerabilities and risks associated with routers are largely systemic and apply to a wide range of brands, including those manufactured in the US.»

I heard a version of that from every cybersecurity expert I spoke with. TP-Link has security flaws, but so do all routers, and I couldn’t point to any that showed collaboration with the Chinese government specifically. 

«We’ve analyzed an astonishing amount of TP-Link firmware. We find stuff, but we find stuff in everything,» said Thomas Pace, CEO of cybersecurity firm NetRise and former security contractor for the Department of Energy.

That said, it’s entirely possible that the government is aware of vulnerabilities that the public is not.

For now, I’m still comfortable using a TP-Link router knowing I follow some basic best practices for network security, but my risk tolerance may be higher than it is for others. 

How to protect your network if you have a TP-Link router

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who uses a TP-Link router, the news of a potential ban might be unnerving.

A Microsoft report from last year found that TP-Link routers have been used in «password spray attacks» since August 2023, which typically occur when the router is using a default password.

Here’s what you can do to protect yourself right now:

Update your login credentials. A shocking amount of router attacks occur because the user never changed the default login credentials set by the router manufacturer. Most routers have an app that lets you update your login credentials, but you can also type your router’s IP address into a URL. These credentials are different from your Wi-Fi name and password, which should also be changed every six months or so. As always with passwords, avoid common words and character combinations, longer passwords are better and don’t reuse passwords from other accounts. 

Use a VPN. If you’re worried about prying eyes from the Chinese government or anyone else, the single best thing you can do to ensure your connection remains private is to use a quality VPN. Privacy-minded folks should look for advanced features like obfuscation, Tor over VPN and a double VPN, which uses a second VPN server for an added layer of encryption. You can even install a VPN on your router directly so that all your traffic is encrypted automatically.

Turn on the firewall and Wi-Fi encryption. These are typically on by default, but now is a good time to make sure they’re activated. This will make it harder for hackers to access the data sent between your router and the devices that connect to it. You can also find these settings by logging into your router from its app or website.

Consider buying a new router. I always recommend buying your own router instead of renting one from your internet service provider. This is mostly a cost-saving measure, but if your ISP uses TP-Link equipment, now might be a good time to switch to another brand. The main thing to look for is WPA3 certification — the most up-to-date security protocol for routers.

Update your firmware. TP-Link’s spokesperson told me last year that customers should regularly check for firmware updates to keep their router secure. «To do this, customers with TP-Link Cloud accounts may simply click the ‘Check for Updates’ button in their product’s firmware menu,» the spokesperson said. «All other customers can find the latest firmware on their product’s Downloads page on TP-Link.com.»