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.