Rocket Lab’s out-of-the-blue protest against NASA’s commissioning its rival, Blue Origin, to develop the Mars Telecommunications Network could derail the 2028 launch of the orbiter, which is critical to sending human explorers to the Red Planet in times ahead.

After NASA’s top scholars on interplanetary missions and on spacecraft technologies reviewed competing bids to craft and loft the Mars orbiter by a constellation of leading space outfits, including SpaceX and Rocket Lab, the agency selected Blue Origin.

The award committee was likely headed by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who holds an aeronautics degree from prestigious Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University and served as a test pilot in a sensational orbital mission, called Polaris Dawn , when he commanded a specially adapted SpaceX Dragon capsule while also testing out its experimental spacesuits and 3-D printed helmets.

Isaacman told me in an earlier interview that he demoed the SpaceX spacecraft and EVA suits to help pave the way for millions of spacefarers to lift off in the future, as spaceflight is democratized, and he aims to push forward human explorers creating citadels and spreading civilization to other planets, starting with Mars .

Independent space pilot Isaacman has already commissioned the first flight of SpaceX’s Starship super-capsule once it is cleared for human missions, and there is even a chance that he might one day pilot a Starship trek to Mars. So he has an overriding interest in ensuring that NASA sends the absolute front-runner orbiter off to the Red Planet as a forerunner to the human discoverers who will follow.

With the leading-edge design of its Mars telecommunications spacecraft and of its New Glenn booster, one of the most advanced recoverable rockets on the planet, it was no surprise when NASA’s leadership declared this month that Blue Origin had won the orbiter contest, with a contract that could pay out up to $700 million.

The bolt from the blue struck when Rocket Lab declared it was challenging the NASA award, via a protest filed with the Government Accountability Office, which can review the granting of government contracts.

“ Rocket Lab has filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office challenging NASA’s award decision for the Mars Telecommunications Network,” the outfit stated in a bulletin posted on the messaging platform X.

The spacecraft designer, founded by New Zealander Peter Beck, added: “NASA’s award decision appears to be inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by [the U.S.] Congress.”

Rocket Lab also curiously charged that NASA had conducted “a punitive review of Rocket Lab’s” spacecraft technologies, “making incorrect assertions and conclusions.”

NASA awarded Blue Origin the contract on September 1, with a super-speed timeline “to deliver a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028 .”

“Blue Origin will design, develop, integrate, launch, and operate the network,” the American space agency added, with the orbiter “expected to be operational at Mars by 2030.”

Blue Origin has been racing to perfect and launch the next-generation telecommunications orbiter on a compressed timeline that gave the outfit just over 800 days to the projected lift-off.

Because the Earth and Mars orbit the Sun at different speeds, the unique and immutable windows for Earth-Mars flights, when the planets are optimally aligned, appear just once every 26 months.

NASA states in its “ Interplanetary Mission Design Handbook : Earth-to-Mars Mission Opportunities 2026 to 2045” that the “Hohmann transfer window” to launch spacecraft from Earth to Mars opens on December 10, 2028 and closes on January 17, 2029.

The next orbital window doesn’t open until January 28, 2031, for flights that would reach Mars toward the close of summer in 2031.

When I asked whether NASA is still on track to meet the 2028 liftoff date, or whether the flight could be bumped until 2031, but without ever mentioning the Rocket Lab protest, Rob Garner, News Chief at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told me in an interview: “Given that this inquiry involves pending litigation, it would be inappropriate for NASA to comment.”

“As required by law,” he adds, “NASA has currently suspended performance of the Mars Telecommunications Network contract due to an ongoing protest.”

As far as the timing of the launch of the Mars orbiter, and whether it could be pushed back until the early 2030s, NASA “may reassess timelines when the adjudication process concludes,” Garner says.

In a Request for Proposals on the Mars Telecommunications Network that the Goddard Center issued in mid-May of this year, NASA leaders stated: “The contractor shall deliver completed ground and flight systems to NASA including completion of all associated reviews and inspections by December 31, 2028.”

“ Delivery by end of CY2028 ensures continuity of critical relay services and prevents a communications gap as existing Mars orbiters age.”

The new orbiter will be integrated into the Mars Relay Network, the constellation of spacecraft circling Mars that speed data and images produced by the Perseverance rover back to mission planners on Earth, select the best landing sites for future landers, including those carrying the first Allied astronauts to Mars, and live-stream the descent and touchdowns of NASA and European spacecraft on the planet’s mysterious dunes.

Because one of the five Mars orbiters, called MAVEN, in this network was recently destroyed, it is urgent for NASA to rebuild the Mars Relay constellation as quickly as possible, especially as NASA and Jared Isaacman begin to prefigure future human treks to the Red Planet.

Brian Hurley, founder of the influential New Space Economy think tank, says the government group GAO reviewing Rocket Lab’s challenge “must decide protests within 100 calendar days, although corrective action could extend the procurement process.”

“If the spacecraft misses its planned Mars departure opportunity, waiting for the next comparable opportunity could mean roughly 26 months,” he told me in an interview.

Because NASA has been forced to freeze its orbiter contract for the duration of the GAO investigation, that means Blue Origin could lose a crucial 100 days in speeding to craft the Mars Network, leaving the outfit with just 700 days to perfect and launch the spacecraft.

Stephanie Plucinsky, senior manager of communications at Blue Origin, told me in an interview the rocket inventor is still rushing “to launch our Mars Telecommunications Orbiter for NASA’s MTN no later than Dec. 31, 2028.”

“We look forward to advancing this urgent mission,” says Plucinsky, a space expert once ensconced inside NASA.

Yet she adds: “With limited Mars launch windows, any delay will greatly risk the timely deployment of this critical communications capability.”

Despite Rocket Lab’s protest, she says,“We remain confident in the strength of our proposal, in NASA’s rigorous selection process, and in Congress’s clear intent to support competition for the Mars Telecommunications Network program.”

Rob Lillis, a planetary space physicist at the University of California Berkeley who co-designed the twin Escapade spacecraft lofted to circle Mars as they map out the planet’s mysterious magnetic fields, which might protect future astronauts from solar storms, told me in an interview: “Particularly after the tragic loss of [the orbiter] MAVEN, there has never been a greater need for additional telecommunications capability at Mars.”

The newest Mars orbiter, he says, will be deployed “to relay data from the two operating rovers as well as future landed and orbital spacecraft.”

“The upcoming Mars Telecommunications Orbiter [MTO] will absolutely rebuild and expand the capabilities of the Mars Relay Network, something that in addition to greatly enabling science, will be essential for the much higher telecommunications needs of human missions.”

“For example,” he says, “streaming video to and from Mars would be impossible without spacecraft like MTO.”

“More and eventually more powerful orbiters will be required to support human missions beyond MTO,” says Dr. Lillis, an acclaimed Mars scholar who has played a central role in Mars missions since earning a doctorate in physics at Berkeley.

Lillis told me in an earlier interview that when Blue Origin lofted the Escapade spacecraft toward its rendezvous with Mars, it “gave us an incredibly accurate launch.”

“ The performance of their rocket was so good that it basically was right on the bull’s-eye in terms of what we were aiming for.”

“As a result,” he added, “we actually could have postponed our first major trajectory correction maneuver for several weeks because the launch was just so accurate."

After performing a picture-perfect launch, the Jeff Bezos-founded spacecraft outfit, incredibly, managed a pinpoint landing of its booster on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic on just its second attempt to recover the rocket.

That means Blue Origin has skyrocketed to become a primary player in the rocket revolution - based on reusable boosters - that is opening a new future for low-cost human spaceflight, and for voyages of discovery that crisscross the planets, Lillis said.

Vint Cerf , one of the central forces in designing the Internet a generation ago, told me across a series of earlier interviews that Blue Origin, with its Mars-bound telecommunications spacecraft, and SpaceX, whose founder Elon Musk has outlined his fantastical vision of encircling Mars with rings of Starlink satellites, could be enlisted in building out the futuristic Interplanetary Internet .

A distinguished visiting scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Vint Cerf has been hailed as a torchbearer for leading the information revolutions that gave birth to the first-generation Internet and to its interplanetary incarnation.

President Bill Clinton gave Cerf the U.S. National Medal of Technology, while President George Bush awarded him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cerf “played an extraordinary role in the story of our time,” Bush said, and by co-inventing the Internet produced “one of the greatest innovations ever launched .”

Even as the Internet sparked the globe’s massive transformation, Cerf teamed up with scientists at NASA’s cutting-edge Jet Propulsion Lab a quarter century ago to begin mapping out and prototyping the Interplanetary Internet, a network of Internets that he told me will one day expand into a Solar System Internet.

The new spacecraft being launched to Mars by Blue Origin and SpaceX, he says, could be integrated into the twin-planet network that is already being tested to speed communications between the robots now exploring the ancient dunes of Mars, the orbiters circling the Red Planet and the American and European ground control stations that might one day be replicated on the fourth orb from the Sun.

Cerf recently stepped down from his post in the top leadership of Google, personally recruited into that position by Google’s techno-wunderkind founders, who share his dual passion for powering advances in space and cyberspace.

With their Google Lunar X Prize , Larry Page and Sergey Brin helped spark the ongoing invasion of the Moon by an expanding contingent of independent spacecraft inventors, even as they appointed Vint Cerf Chief Internet Evangelist .

During one interview, Cerf told me that over the next decades, just as independent rocket corps like SpaceX and Blue Origin come to dominate spaceflight, “some of the communication systems will move from the responsibility of the space organizations like NASA and ESA and JAXA to commercial enterprise.”

As independent space probes step up their exploration of other planets, he predicts, they could also double as nodes in the celestial internet that ultimately spans the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Cerf, a techno-seer who’s been remarkable at divining the future, and even helping create it, predicts the rings of spacecraft that Blue Origin and SpaceX despatch to Mars will one day begin beaming broadband connections to the first human Martians who set out to create a second foundation for civilization on the twin planet.