When Blue Origin scrubbed the launch of its NG-2 mission on its New Glenn rocket on Nov. 12, the culprit wasn’t Florida’s notoriously unpredictable thunderstorms or high winds — it was space weather. NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, the primary payload on NG-2, was eventually launched on Nov. 13 and is designed to study how solar storms stripped Mars of its atmosphere. However, the mission was grounded by the very phenomenon it was built to investigate.
The decision to scrub the second NG-2 launch attempt came after multiple coronal mass ejections barreled toward Earth earlier in the week, triggering severe G4 geomagnetic storms that painted auroras across skies as far south as Mexico and Florida. For mission planners, the spectacular light show represented a serious threat to the two ESCAPADE spacecraft during the vulnerable launch and deployment phases of the mission.