Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin successfully reused one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time ever on Sunday, but the company failed in its primary mission: delivering a communications satellite into orbit for customer AST SpaceMobile.
AST SpaceMobile issued a statement Sunday afternoon that the New Glenn rocket’s upper stage put the BlueBird 7 satellite into a “lower than planned” orbit. The company said the satellite successfully separated from the rocket and was put into operation, but the altitude is too low to “support operations” and will now have to be deorbited — and left to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The cost of losing the satellite is covered by AST SpaceMobile’s insurance policy, according to the company, and there are back-to-back BlueBird satellites to be completed in about a month. AST SpaceMobile has contracts with more than just Blue Origin, and the company said it expects to be able to launch 45 more vehicles into space by the end of 2026.
But this marks the first major failure for Blue Origin’s New Glenn program, which only made its maiden flight in January 2025 after more than a decade of development. This was the second mission in which New Glenn carried a customer payload into space, after launching two Mars-bound spacecraft on behalf of NASA last November. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The apparent failure of New Glenn’s second phase could have broader implications beyond Blue Origin’s near-term commercial ambitions. The company is striving to become one of the primary launch service providers for NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon and beyond. The space agency — and the Trump administration — have put pressure on Blue Origin and SpaceX to put landers on the moon by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, before moving forward with returning humans to the lunar surface.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp And he even said His company will “move heaven and earth” to help NASA return to the moon faster.
Blue Origin recently completed testing of its first version of its lunar lander, which the company is expected to attempt to launch sometime this year (without any crew). Blue Origin had suggested last year that it was considering launching this lander on the third New Glenn mission, but ultimately decided to launch the AST SpaceMobile satellite instead.
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New Glenn’s third launch appears to have gotten off to a good start on Sunday, as the massive rocket blasted off at 7:35 a.m. local time from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This was the first time Blue Origin reused a previously launched New Glenn booster — the same rocket that flew during the second New Glenn mission. About 10 minutes after liftoff, the booster came back down and landed on a drone ship in the ocean, just as it did last November. Jeff Bezos Even shared drone footage The moment the rocket landed on the social networking site X, owned by his competitor Elon Musk. (Musk show Congratulations.)
About two hours after the launch, Blue Origin made the announcement mail That New Glenn’s upper stage placed the AST SpaceMobile satellite into a “non-nominal orbit.” The company has not released any further information since this post.
Blue Origin has spent a long time developing New Glenn, and the company took its decision to begin launching commercial payloads during these early missions as a sign of confidence in the process. By comparison, SpaceX has spent the past few years launching experimental versions of its massive spacecraft, but has remained committed to using dummy payloads while working out the rocket’s kinks.
SpaceX has lost deeper payloads in the Falcon 9 program. In 2015, on the 19th Falcon 9 mission, the rocket exploded mid-flight and lost an entire cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. In 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launch pad during testing, causing Meta to lose an internet satellite.
