Blue Origin’s New Glenn misplaced a customer satellite on three of its launches

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin also successfully used its New Glenn rocket first time ever Sunday, but the company failed in its main mission: sending a video link to drive AST SpaceMobile customers.

AST SpaceMobile released a statement Sunday afternoon that the upper part of the New Glenn rocket placed the BlueBird 7 satellite in an orbit that “was lower than planned.” The film has successfully separated from the rocket and ignited, the company said, but its altitude is too low “to continue working” and it must now be replaced – left to warm up in Earth’s atmosphere.

The cost of the loss of the satellite is covered by AST SpaceMobile insurance, according to the company, and there are successive BlueBird satellites completed in about a month. AST SpaceMobile has contracts with more than Blue Origin, and the company said it expects to launch 45 more by the end of 2026.

But this represents the first major setback for Blue Origin’s New Glenn program, which is slated for its first flight in January 2025 after more than a decade. This was the second mission in which New Glenn has carried a customer’s cargo into space, having launched a spacecraft to Mars 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 stage could have far greater implications than Blue Origin’s near-commercial performance. The company is pushing hard to be one of the founders of NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon and beyond. The space agency – and the Trump administration – have pushed Blue Origin and SpaceX to be able to put astronauts on the moon by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, before moving forward to return humans to the surface of the moon.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp he said again his company will “move heaven and earth” to help NASA return to the moon faster.

Blue Origin recently completed testing its first version of its moon probe, which the company is expected to test and launch sometime this year (without a crew). Blue Origin said last year that it was considering launching a third New Glenn technology, but eventually. decided to launch the AST SpaceMobile satellite instead.

New Glenn’s third launch appears to be off to a good start on Sunday, as the giant rocket lifted off at 7:35 a.m. time from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This is the first time Blue Origin has reused a previously flown New Glenn booster – the same one that flew on the second New Glenn mission. About 10 minutes after takeoff, the booster came back down and landed on the ship in the ocean, just like last November. Jeff Bezos even shared drone footage about the arrival of encouragement on X, a social network that had its competitor Elon Musk. (Musk gave thank you.)

About two hours after launch, however, Blue Origin announced itself post that New Glenn’s upper stage put the AST SpaceMobile satellite into a “distinct orbit”. The company has not released any information as of press time.

Blue Origin spent a long time developing New Glenn, and it was taken as a sign of confidence that the company decided to start launching commercial payloads for these first missions. By comparison, SpaceX has spent the past few years testing its large Starship models, but has continued to use dummy payloads while working on the rocket.

SpaceX lost a lot of money in its Falcon 9 program. In 2015, during the 19th flight of the Falcon 9, the rocket exploded in flight and lost the entire International Space Station cargo ship. In 2016, the Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad during a test, resulting in the destruction of the Meta satellite.