While it’s fairly common for inclement Earth weather to delay rocket launches, it’s very rare for space weather to do the same. But’s that’s exactly what’s just happened.
Blue Origin had planned to launch its two ESCAPADE spacecraft to Mars from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday following a scrubbed attempt on Sunday, which, incidentally, was down to Earth weather.
But on Wednesday, Blue Origin said that while it’s rocket was ready to lift off, it had decided out of an abundance of caution to hold the launch “due to highly elevated solar activity and its potential effects on the ESCAPADE spacecraft.”
It’s now waiting for the space weather conditions to improve, which could take several days.
The disruption is down to extreme activity on the sun in recent days involving not one but two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the direction of Earth. A CME is a huge burst of hot, charged plasma and magnetic fields ejected from the sun’s outer atmosphere into space. The eruption can large amounts of solar material flying outward at high speed, sometimes impacting Earth and in severe cases causing disruption to communication satellites, power grids, navigation systems, and other technologies that rely on Earth’s magnetic environment.
The geomagnetic storm currently impacting Earth is described as a “cannibal” solar storm because one faster eruption caught up with an earlier one, intensifying its effects.
The storm has produced spectacular auroras visible as far south as Alabama — a real rarity — and prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to issue a G4 (severe) geomagnetic storm watch.
The effects of this latest solar storm on critical infrastructure have yet to be fully established.
These faraway celestial events can heat and expand Earth’s upper atmosphere, increasing atmospheric drag on low-Earth orbit satellites. Indeed, three years ago, around 40 just-launched Starlink satellites burned up in Earth’s atmosphere due to increased atmospheric drag caused by a solar storm.
With that in mind, it’s perfectly understandable that Blue Origin and NASA have paused the ESCAPADE launch.
