NASA and Rocket Lab aim to prove we can go to Mars for 1/10 the price
A pair of Rocket Lab-made spacecraft are about to embark on a two-step journey. The first step is the 55-hour, 2,500-mile stretch from California to the launch site at Cape Canaveral. The second step? Just 11 months and 230 million miles to Mars.
The objective of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission is to study the interaction between solar winds and the Martian atmosphere. The University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) developed the scientific payloads for the mission, but the satellite bus — the actual platform that will travel through space and host those payloads in an orbit around Mars — is all Rocket Lab. The mission is currently set to launch no earlier than October on the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, according to NASA.
While the company is best known for its Electron rocket, which is second only to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in terms of launch numbers, the majority of its revenue actually comes from building and selling spacecraft and spacecraft components. With ESCAPADE, Rocket Lab is looking to show both the space agency and the world that it can produce extremely high-performance spacecraft that are capable of journeying throughout the solar system.
The company proved itself once when it built the satellite bus for NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission to the moon in 2022. That spacecraft took a nearly five-month sojourn into deep space before entering lunar orbit. But getting to Mars takes significantly longer — and historically, it’s also been very, very expensive. Two recent missions that sent orbiters around the Red Planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005 and MAVEN in 2013, each cost NASA over a half billion dollars.
So in 2019, the space agency established the Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program to fund small spacecraft missions into deep space. Like other NASA programs established in recent years, it’s also an effort on the part of the agency to embrace risk. Instead of spending $550 million on a mission into deep space, NASA set a goal to spend just one-tenth of that and gave each SIMPLEx mission a $55 million price cap, excluding launch. ESCAPADE is one of three missions the agency selected under the SIMPLEx program, and in all likelihood, the first that will actually launch.
Those funds went to the principal investigator for the mission, SSL, who contracted Rocket Lab for the two satellite buses. Rocket Lab isn’t saying how much of that $55 million went to them, but the lead systems engineer for ESCAPADE, Christophe Mandy, said the company was “two orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else.”
The spacecraft, named Blue and Gold, are based on Rocket Lab’s Explorer platform (which gained flight heritage during CAPSTONE), known for its high delta-v capabilities to support missions of this kind. One of the biggest challenges for the Rocket Lab engineers was designing a spacecraft that can get from Earth orbit all the way to Mars; for that reason, the ESCAPADE spacecraft are about 70% fuel by mass. That fuel will make the spacecraft capable of about 3 kilometers per second of delta-v, or change in velocity, which is very high for a satellite of this size.