Two small orbiters end a five-year launch drought
Nothing had left Earth for Mars since July 2020. ESCAPADE's twin orbiters broke the drought — then parked at a Lagrange point to wait a year for the transfer window.
A Blue Origin New Glenn lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 3:55 p.m. EST on 13 November 2025 with two spacecraft, 535 kilograms each fuelled. Blue and Gold separated from the upper stage a little over half an hour in; the first stage landed on a ship in the Atlantic, the first New Glenn booster recovered. It was the first Mars launch from Earth in five years and four months.
Two transfer windows had gone by unused. The 2022 window should have carried ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover, but Russia was supplying the launcher and the landing platform, and ESA cut ties with Roscosmos after the invasion of Ukraine; the rover went into storage, now aimed at 2028, a decade late. The 2024 window passed with nothing at all.
ESCAPADE is deliberately cheap: two identical orbiters built by Rocket Lab for the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley under NASA's small-planetary-missions line, 75 million dollars all in — 55 for spacecraft and instruments, 20 for the rocket. Each carries a magnetometer, an electrostatic analyser and a Langmuir probe. One spacecraft cannot tell whether Mars's magnetosphere changed or whether the spacecraft moved somewhere different; two at separated points untangle time from space, which is what watching the solar wind strip the atmosphere away requires.
Because New Glenn's debut slipped past the 2024 window, ESCAPADE launched without a trajectory to Mars, going instead to a loiter orbit around the Earth–Sun L2 point, 1.5 million kilometres out on the night side, where the pair measure space weather with the instruments that must later agree at Mars. One underperformed on a thruster burn in December 2025, delaying its next trajectory correction.
As of late September 2026 they are still at L2, with Trans-Mars Injection scheduled for November 2026, a cruise of roughly ten months and Mars orbit insertion in September 2027. With that burn and Japan's MMX both manifested for it, the 2026 window will be the busiest since 2020.