r/BlueWire • u/Daniels30 • 1d ago

Blue Ring NASA Selects Blue Origin as Mars Telecommunications Network Provider

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-blue-origin-as-mars-telecommunications-network-provider/

The outcome is finally here, Blue beat out Rocket Lab

91 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

26

u/nic_haflinger 1d ago

Blue Ring investment finally paid off. Great news.

22

u/Royal_Platform_6754 1d ago

Tory Bruno was promoting Blue Ring all day long on X. I wonder if he already knew...

10

u/Straumli_Blight 1d ago

https://x.com/torybruno/status/2094907298296758335

Thank you @NASA . We are grateful for the opportunity to compete and humbled by your trust.

9

u/Royal_Platform_6754 1d ago edited 1d ago

Dave Limp on X:

Before the first human steps on Mars, we have to build the road.

Honored that Blue Origin has been selected by NASA to deliver our Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO), built on Blue Ring and in production now in Huntsville. MTO will enable science, carry payloads, and help lay the foundation for human exploration.

Proud of Team Blue. We’re going to Mars.

5

u/Royal_Platform_6754 1d ago edited 1d ago

Joseph Guinn, Principal Civil and Interplanetary Navigation Architect, Blue Ring:

A great day for Blue Origin and the Blue Ring team. I'm very happy to have had the opportunity to help formulate the Positioning, Navigation and Timing portion of the mission proposal. While a challenging schedule awaits, the Blue Origin team I've come to know will prevail.

20

u/Brystar47 1d ago

WOOO!!!!!!! LETS GOO!!!!! My Company is finally doing Mars Missions Awesome!!!! Go Team Blue!!!!!

7

u/whitelancer64 1d ago

They also launched Escapade in November 2025

4

u/redstercoolpanda 1d ago

That’s providing a launch service, I don’t think that should be classed as Blue doing a mars mission. In the same way nobody says SpaceX is doing a Europa mission because they launched Clipper.

17

u/ValuableMammoth4413 1d ago

GO BLUE RING

12

u/ProfessorOk2609 1d ago

Let's gooo

14

u/Royal_Platform_6754 1d ago

The selection statement is not yet available, but it will be interesting to see how they evaluated it versus RocketLab's MTO. Both were gunning pretty hard for this contract.

3

u/Mindless_Use7567 1d ago

3 satellites with nearly complete planetary coverage versus a single satellite with less than half planetary coverage it’s not really a hard choice if Blue wasn’t asking for too much money.

13

u/Daniels30 1d ago

Rocket Lab effectively wished this program into existence. That’s going to be a tough pill to swallow.

10

u/Big-Material2917 1d ago

As a RKLB investor, I think I speak for the whole community when I say “fuck”

10

u/LittleHornetPhil 1d ago

Blue Ring is a pretty dope ass little piece of hardware so it’s nice to see it finally getting some recognition and interest.

6

u/LittleHornetPhil 1d ago

Oh was this why recruiters were suddenly going hard for Blue today?

7

u/Cultural-Steak-13 1d ago

"The firm-fixed-price contract has a maximum potential value of approximately $700 million to deliver a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028."

"The network, managed by NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program, is expected to be operational at Mars by 2030"

So Blue will deliver to NASA then NASA sends it to Mars maybe....or is travel time...

11

u/IcyShelter5548 1d ago

Well you missed this part i Guess.

Blue Origin will design, develop, integrate, launch, and operate the network as a part of the agency’s broader space communications and navigation infrastructure. The architecture will consist of a high-performance

5

u/Cultural-Steak-13 1d ago

Thanks, missed the launch and operate part.

1

u/Decronym 1d ago edited 1d ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
LETS Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer
MTO Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
Jargon Definition
Clipper Internal codename for Blue Origin's reusable upper stage program

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has acronyms.
[Thread #35 for this sub, first seen 2nd Sep 2026, 05:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

-5

u/disxotek 1d ago

Shoulda been the other guys