Solar storm pushes Blue Origin’s New Glenn Mars launch to Nov 13 after two scrubs

Space weather has altered launch calendars before—Apollo 12 was struck by lightning in 1969 minutes after liftoff, and a 1989 storm shut down Québec’s grid—but commercial operators have rarely delayed launches pre-emptively. The caution reflects two converging trends: the rising intensity of Solar Cycle 25 as it approaches its predicted 2025 peak, and NASA’s growing reliance on low-cost, privately built hardware such as ESCAPADE (<$100 M) mounted on new-entrant rockets. If New Glenn nails both payload delivery and booster recovery, it would become only the second reusable heavy-lift system after SpaceX’s Falcon 9, tightening a duopoly that may define launch economics for decades. Conversely, another failed landing or further solar-induced delay would underscore how vulnerable even cutting-edge private spacecraft remain to the Sun’s whims—an echo of the 1859 Carrington Event that fried telegraph lines and a reminder that our century-long march toward routine space access is still at the mercy of cycles measured in star-spots.