The slingshot that flung Rocket Lab spacecraft toward Mars

The launch was to take place from Cape Canaveral, on a New Glenn rocket built by the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin, in September 2024.

But it was scrubbed on concerns the rocket would not be ready in time.

By the time the New Glenn rocket was finally launched, on November 13, 2025, a straight-shot between Earth and Mars was no longer possible.

In fact, the Red Planet was in the worst possible position.

“If you think of it as an athletics track, Mars was on the wrong side,” says Sarah Blyde, Rocket Lab’s programme director for the Escapade mission.

It was a poser for Rocket Lab, Nasa, and the US space agency’s partner on the mission: UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

The answer was to send Blue and Gold into a “loiter orbit” around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, then put them on a path timed to bring them back past Earth when the planets lined up.

After a year-long wait, Blue and Gold approached Earth again last weekend, travelling at about 2.1km per second, Blyde said.

The idea was to execute a 10-minute burn of the spacecraft’s respective engines to slingshot them around our planet, with Earth’s gravity aiding their acceleration.

Rocket Lab mission control centres in the US and NZ worked together on the manoeuvre.

Blue arrived first, skimming just 1000km above Earth on November 7.

Gold arrived two days later, coming as close as 1600km as it zipped around the planet.

The slingshot manoeuvre worked flawlessly, Blyde says.

Blue accelerated to 10.4km per second, or five times faster.

Gold surged to 10.9km per second, making it the fastest object ever featuring components designed in light-industrial Mt Wellington, by some margin.

Gravity assists have been executed before, Blyde says, but this was the manoeuvre executed by spacecraft on their way to Mars.

Blue and Gold are now on a 10-month trip to Mars, on the direct route they would have taken if launched on time.

They will arrive in late 2027, and should be in the correct orbits and ready to begin their scientific observations by early 2028.

The two spacecraft, weighing 535kg each fully fuelled, detached from the New Glenn rocket once it cleared Earth’s atmosphere, and are now powered by their own “satellite bus”, complete with a propulsion system, carrying various sensors supplied by UC Berkeley.

“Ninety per cent of the bus was designed and built in-house by Rocket Lab, and New Zealand played a big role in that.”

The final integration was done at the company’s plant in Long Beach, California, before testing and shipping the finished satellites to Florida.

“New Zealand played a big part across the board,” Blyde says.

“Specifically, they were a big part of the propulsion system, and they did a lot of work on the fluid systems that support the engine, the main engine that has just done these burns, as well as what we call the reaction control system.”

As well as research and development work on the technology, Rocket Lab also manufactures reaction wheels (which help keep a satellite in the correct orientation) at its Mt Wellington plant – although the wheels in Blue and Gold were made at the multinational firm’s Toronto facility.

Blue and Gold slingshotted around Earth at different heights and speeds because they will observe the Red Planet from different angles.

Mars wasn’t always the cold, thin-aired world we see today. Billions of years ago, it had a much thicker atmosphere, Blyde says.

A key culprit in its loss is the solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, which strips ions from the planet’s upper atmosphere.

Escapade is designed to study that process as it happens.

Once at Mars, Blue and Gold will work in tandem, measuring the planet’s magnetic environment from two vantage points at once.

The data will help scientists reconstruct Mars’ atmospheric escape history, characterise its space weather environment and inform planning for future human exploration.

How did Blyde come to be leading a Mars mission?

Sarah Blyde studied engineering, accounting and finance at the University of Auckland before beginning her career in the oil and gas industry across the Tasman.

She was 26 and working as an engineer in the petroleum industry in Western Australia in 2019, marvelling at the stars and planets in the night sky when, “I had an epiphany one day that while they need engineers in the petroleum industry, they also need them in the space industry”.

Blyde decided to do a post-graduate degree in Europe, but returned for a break in Auckland in May 2020 – just in time for the first Covid lockdown. She took a job as a manufacturing data administrator with Rocket Lab before being promoted up the ladder over the next few years.

In 2023, she relocated to Rocket Lab’s Long Beach, California facility to oversee Escapade integration, before becoming Escapade programme manager the following year.

While the two slingshot manoeuvres were the tensest 20 minutes of Blyde’s career, a lot rests on the elements of the Escape mission to come.

Rocket Lab needed to prove its interplanetary chops to Nasa as a provider of cost-effective, speedily put together missions.

The Kiwi-American firm has already put up its hand as one of the contenders interested in a future Nasa mission that will see Martian rocks, already collected by a rover mission, scooped up and carried to Earth.

The mission is still at a request-for-proposals stage, with the US space agency yet to issue a formal tender, but Rocket Lab founder Sir Peter Beck expects it will be a “multibillion-dollar opportunity”.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.

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