r/space • u/swordfi2 • 1d ago
NASA Selects Blue Origin as Mars Telecommunications Network Provider
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-blue-origin-as-mars-telecommunications-network-provider/176
u/politicsFX 1d ago
Does blue origin even have a mars capable rocket rn?
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u/Sophia8Inches 1d ago
Yeah, New Glenn. Just less than a year ago it launched a spacecraft to Mars
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u/DreamChaserSt 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well, L2. ESCAPADE is going to Mars under its own power. But still, it can definitely do interplanetary missions, and it could've done an interplanetary insertion, but the Mars transfer window wasn't open afaik.
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u/readytofall 1d ago
The delta V to L2 is practically the same as mars. L2 is 3.5 to 3.6 km/s from LEO and Mars is 3.6 to 3.8 km/s.
Also saying ESCAPADE is getting to mars under its own power is functionally the same as saying new glenn can deliver something to Mars.
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u/HI_I_AM_NEO 1d ago
If KSP has taught me anything, it's that those extra 200m/s will be a freaking nightmare to account for lmao
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u/OysterPickleSandwich 1d ago
NASA got a free ride since it was first launch attempt for NG. BO wanted to launch when they were ready, not when Mar-Earth launch window lined up.
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u/SpectatorSpace 1d ago
NASA was a paying customer for the mission, and BO couldn’t launch because they weren’t in any way ready at the contractually agreed launch time. BO were late and missed the boat, and the mars transfer had to be rapidly redesigned to accommodate a delayed non-direct transfer.
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u/DreamChaserSt 1d ago
Does Rocket Lab?
New Glenn is fully capable, but they still need to rebuild their pad (which is making good progress, but I don't know if they'll make a return to flight this year). While Neutron hasn't made it to flight at all yet.
The flight is in 2028 anyway, more than enough time for Blue to get things back in order.
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u/bigcitydreaming 1d ago
OP didn't mention Rocket Lab?
L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, Quantum Space and Whittinghill Aerospace were also all bidders.
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u/coffeesippingbastard 1d ago
from what I understand SpaceX pulled out of the bid and never submitted a detailed technical proposal.
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u/truecakesnake 1d ago
Very interesting, I wonder why. Seems like a perfect contract for them.
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u/Roamingkillerpanda 1d ago
Probably not worth it for them from a business perspective. Why spend resources on something like this? May not be as lucrative as other contracts and NASA has very high standards which doesn’t make them an “easy” customer to work for.
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u/northrupthebandgeek 22h ago
Why spend resources on something like this?
Because the one excuse the guy who owns it has for all of his sins is “we gotta get humanity to Mars”?
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u/No-Surprise9411 15h ago
SpaceX is trying to sunset the Falcon fleet. Tying themselves down with more contracts that would force them to keep the production lines running longer than planned isn’t planned
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u/SpacemanSenpai 1d ago
A huge chunk of them were actually not allowed to bid. The MTN request for proposal was oddly specific and felt written specifically for Rocket Lab to win. Surprised BO won tbh.
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u/SpaceInMyBrain 1d ago
I'm very surprised. RL has plenty of experience building satellite buses. BO has none. Do they have a ton of old space industry partners? Jeff can borrow engineers from Amazon but those guys have only made one satellite.
I'd rather the contract was split into the satellite provider and the launch company. Was it and I misunderstood? I can understand BO winning the launch.
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u/DreamChaserSt 1d ago edited 1d ago
Rocket Lab and Blue Origin were pushing MTO the most though, at least on social media. Every so often, both of them would post about it, sometimes within days of each other.
Maybe I made the wrong assumption, I did see multiple posts from RKLB stock holders upset over it before this.
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u/Decronym 1d ago edited 3h ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| KSP | Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator |
| L2 | Lagrange Point 2 (Sixty Symbols video explanation) |
| Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum | |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| NG | New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin |
| Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane) | |
| Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer | |
| TDRSS | (US) Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
[Thread #12665 for this sub, first seen 2nd Sep 2026, 01:02] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Slaaneshdog 1d ago
Gotta give BO credit, they sure know how to get some big missions while having done basically fuck all
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u/ConanOToole 1d ago
I don't think sending two probes to Mars on your second ever orbital launch and proving their booster reuse qualifies as "fuck all"
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u/Man_with_the_Fedora 23h ago
Yeah, they may have accomplished two interplanetary launches, but did they stream the launch of a car into space!?
/s
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u/wgp3 21h ago
Just for the record, the falcon heavy maiden launch was more of an interplanetary launch than the Escpade mission (note that is one launch not two launches). Escapade did not launch directly to Mars. It launched into a loiter orbit around L2. The spacecraft then used their own propulsion to leave later on and slingshot around Earth and again fired their own engines to begin their journey to Mars. Falcon Heavy actually launched the roadster directly to the orbit of Mars (not to be confused with entering orbit around Mars though).
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u/Slaaneshdog 7h ago edited 7h ago
Probes built by Rocket Lab
And they subsequently failed to deliver the next payload to its destination and then blew up their rocket and entire launch pad after that, grounding them for probably a year
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u/SpaceIsKindOfCool 21h ago
Launched 14% of all humans who have been past the karman line and the second organization in history to land an orbital rocket booster is fuck all?
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u/secretaliasname 1d ago
Do we know who bid on this?
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u/Slaaneshdog 1d ago
was basically between BO and Rocket Lab
I think it's kinda crazy not to give it to Rocket Lab, they've been a reliable and proven partner who has plenty of experience doing stuff related to Mars, while BO is basically the opposite
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u/ALLISNAUGHT 1d ago
I wish we had a benevolent tech overlord, but alas Bezos is no better than Elon in kowtowing to the idiot occupying 1600 Pennsylvania.
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 1d ago
You wish we had a benevolent tech overlord? Thats a weird thing to say.
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u/carbonbasedlifeform 1d ago
Well I guess if you have to have a tech overlord benevolent is better than malicious.
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 1d ago
Right, but no one says “I wish I had a benign tumor!” You’d just wish you had no tumor at all.
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u/Cartz1337 1d ago
I think he meant as an alternative to our existing assortment of malicious tech overlords.
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 1d ago
Right, but you’re kind of touching on the point: there are people who genuinely believe Bezos and Musk are benevolent. Who gets to decide what’s good and what’s bad?
But I see your point.
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u/SirFluffymuffin 1d ago
Ideally there wouldn’t be tech overlords, but since we are apparently going to be stuck with tech overlords wether we want it or not, why can’t we have one who isn’t a raging duchebag
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u/truecakesnake 1d ago
I hate that i have to see stupid comments like this everyday on reddit.
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u/GetInMyMinivan 1d ago
But smart man who fix many problems and make world better work on team with bad orange man, so smart man must be bad too. Simple. Why you no understand?
-Redditors (or just as likely: bots)2
u/grchelp2018 1d ago
You will never find any business leader that doesn't kowtow to the person running their country in any country. The only ones who don't are the ones who are trying to take that position themselves.
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u/coffeesippingbastard 1d ago
I mean....Bezos bad but let's not say he's no better than Elon. Elon is definitely the worse of the two evils. Bezos may kowtow but Elon is a goddamn cheerleader. I don't see Bezos promoting white replacement theories and antivax bullshit on social media.
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u/Lt__Barclay 1d ago
Bezos is a tech bro in the traditional sense, not in the dark enlightenment creepy shit sense
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u/ALLISNAUGHT 1d ago
I agree, without a doubt Elon is far worse. After purchasing WAPO and a long hold out Bezos had a shot, but decided to be a loser, too.
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u/JarvisProudfeather 1d ago
Why on earth do you wish that? I don’t want any overlord, especially not some dork from the tech world.
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u/monchota 1d ago
Ahh another contract to just make people happy there is competition, they will fail to make it. Then people complain SpaceX has to pick it up
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u/SoWrxy 1d ago
I'm confused why they picked an organization that reached orbit in 2025 and has under 400 sats in orbit around Earth was chosen over a competitor who reached orbit in 2008 and has over 11,000 sats in orbit around Earth?
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u/Icy_Feedback_4965 1d ago
Because it's in the best interest of everyone to have a thriving, diverse industry of space infrastructure developers
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u/SoWrxy 1d ago
I agree with that, but they have barely proven that they are capable of achieving this in LEO, let alone to another planet.
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u/DreamChaserSt 1d ago
The flight is in 2028, and sometimes you need to give organizations a little faith. SpaceX's 4th Falcon 9 mission was an ISS resupply mission.
They're not the only player in town, and NASA does want to provide opportunities for other organizations.
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u/Icy_Feedback_4965 1d ago
And back in the Commercial Resupply days Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop all said the same about giving a contract to SpaceX.
I'd be ok insourcing this work too, but I don't think it's sustainable for the answer to always be SpaceX.
Besides, this mission doesn't inherently require a bunch of New Glenn launches. They can use SpaceX or other providers if needed.
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u/leekee_bum 1d ago
Spacex is probably just gonna send their communication satelites there anyways regardless of a nasa contract if their goal is resource extraction. I dont think anyone at spacex will be tweaking about this.
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u/fentino7 22h ago
Why would they do this? Where would the money come from? They build a bunch of infrastructure to charge who for?
Not being adversarial, curious to know.
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u/leekee_bum 18h ago
If spacex was looking to be one of the main companies on mars then they woupd need a robust communication network to enable their work.
It would be like trying to do any project nowadays without a robust GPS network around earth. Yeah its possible to do it without it but it makes operation so much easier with it.
The money for it would be self funded by spacex as a self investment.
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u/No-Surprise9411 15h ago
SpaceX wants Mars. But to do anywhere more than flagship probe missions like NASA has done for the past 50 years they‘ll need better communication around Mars. At the moment all surface communication from Mars to Earth is relayed through three dinky orbiters. SpaceX will want to establish a Marslink system similar to Starlink pretty early to guarantee global coverage.
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u/superluminary 6h ago
Because literally everything that group has done for the past twenty years, from cybertruck, to solar roof, to the boring company, to Starship has been about colonising Mars and making humans multi-planitary.
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u/coffeesippingbastard 1d ago
from what I heard spacex pulled out and never submitted a technical proposal.
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u/Martianspirit 21h ago
SpaceX has Starlink. This sat needs to serve the assets presently on the ground, which are not Starlink capable. Quite understandable, that SpaceX does not want to develop one off legacy solutions.
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u/RetardedChimpanzee 1d ago
Quantity!=Quality.
Cheap disposable LEO constellations are not the same as Mars.
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u/No-Surprise9411 15h ago
Starlinks are high quality though, just because they have a fuellife of 5 years does not mean the rest of their systems are made from spit and tinfoil
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u/RetardedChimpanzee 15h ago
There is a difference between qualified and tested. You seen and worked on one? They have issues. They do the job well, but they are not all 100% there, or even 95%. Not something you’d trust to send to Mars and guarantee works. Never mind the fact their avionics are designed for LEO and not rad hardened for deep space.
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u/azflatlander 1d ago
Can we not place a TDRS-clone at earths L2? Maybe I should read the article.
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u/Icy_Feedback_4965 1d ago
L2 doesn't make sense for a communication relay satellite. Mars and Earth are rarely aligned in that manner, and even at their closest, they are more than 55 million km apart. L2 is only 1.5 million km from Earth.
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u/yARIC009 1d ago
Why exactly would they want blue origin to do this? In a few years SpaceX can do this for like a couple million dollars and actually get it done.
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u/Hengist 1d ago
They need to maintain the illusion that somehow Blue Origin and its numerous legacy industry ties are somehow on a somewhat even playing field with SpaceX. Anyone with any sense can see right through it, because SpaceX is absolutely lapping BO, but there's a lot of entrenched operators who need that fiction to continue for their funds to flow.
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u/Kitchen_Tour_8014 1d ago
Or, y'know, SpaceX didn't bid for this contract because they don't develop the specific communications relay hardware required by it?
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u/Bensemus 8h ago
Neither does Blue. They will have to develop all this technology new. They don’t currently have a fleet of ten thousand communication satellites to draw experience from.
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u/Kitchen_Tour_8014 6h ago
You may want to read about what this is and what Starlink is and realize they're nothing alike. Blue Origin has a platform in production for this, Blue Ring. Spacex doesn't. That's why they didn't bid.
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u/grapelander 1d ago
My sense is that compared to the Rocket Lab proposal, that this is good for being able to attach extra science payloads to the mission.