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Blue Origin
For the first time, Blue Origin has successfully landed its New Glenn booster rocket, which had been flown on a prior mission, but the satellite payload that came with it was shunted into an incorrect orbit.
The launch marked a technical milestone for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space firm, with Blue Origin now only the second company, after SpaceX, to land a booster that had been used in another launch.
But New Glenn’s upper stage placed a satellite from AST SpaceMobile into a lower-than-planned orbit. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited.
The mixed results show that Blue Origin is still trailing behind its biggest rival SpaceX, even if the mission did demonstrate that it can now reuse parts of rockets that are capable of placing payloads into orbit.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin is currently contracted for major components of Nasa’s Artemis missions to the Moon. This weekend’s launch helps the firm demonstrate that it can meet Nasa’s sustainability requirements, as New Glenn will eventually be used to transport the Blue Moon lander to the lunar surface. Nevertheless, the failure of the upper stage means that further work will need to be undertaken before Nasa will allow humans to be transported in the rocket.
The AST satellite in question is part of a growing constellation that will be used to beam a space-based broadband service to virtually any location on Earth. So far, it has signed a deal with Vodafone to build out a direct-to-device service for European customers that could help to fill some rural blackspots in network coverage.
AST said the cost of the lost satellite, called BlueBird 7, is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy. BlueBird 7 would have been the firm’s eighth deployed into low-Earth orbit and is one of many planned for its broadband network. The company is currently in production through BlueBird 32, with BlueBird 8 to 10 expected to be ready to ship in approximately 30 days.
It expects that orbital launches will occur roughly every one to two months during 2026, targeting approximately 45 satellites by the end of the year.
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