Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, successfully repurposed one of its New Glenn rockets to the first time on Sunday, but the company failed in its primary mission: putting a communications satellite into orbit for customer AST SpaceMobile.
AST SpaceMobile issued a statement Sunday afternoon saying the New Glenn rocket’s upper stage placed the BlueBird 7 satellite into a “lower than planned” orbit. The satellite successfully separated from the rocket and ignited, the company said, but the altitude is too low “to sustain operations” and will now have to be deorbited and left to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The cost of the loss of the satellite is covered by AST SpaceMobile’s insurance policy, according to the company, and there are successive BlueBird satellites that will be completed in about a month. AST SpaceMobile has contracts with more than just Blue Origin, and the company said it hopes to be able to launch 45 more into space by the end of 2026.
But this represents the first major failure for Blue Origin’s New Glenn program, which did not make its first flight until January 2025 after more than a decade of development. This was the second mission in which New Glenn carried a customer payload into space, following the launch of twin 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 stage could have broader implications beyond Blue Origin’s short-term commercial ambitions. The company is pushing hard to become a major launch provider for NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon and beyond. The space agency, and the Trump administration, have pushed Blue Origin and SpaceX to be able to place landers on the Moon by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, before moving toward returning humans to the lunar surface.
Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin has 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 own lunar lander, which the company is expected to attempt to launch sometime this year (without a 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 appeared to get off to a good start on Sunday, when the megarocket lifted off at 7:35 a.m. local time from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the first time Blue Origin reused a previously flown New Glenn booster, the same one flown during the second New Glenn mission. About 10 minutes after takeoff, the booster descended again and landed on an unmanned ship in the ocean, just as it had done last November. jeff bezos even shared drone images of the booster landing on X, the social media site owned by rival Elon Musk. (Musk offered Congratulations.)
However, about two hours after launch, Blue Origin announced on its own mail that the New Glenn upper stage placed the AST SpaceMobile satellite into an “off-nominal orbit.” The company has not released any further information since that publication.
Blue Origin spent a lot of time developing New Glenn, and it was taken as a sign of confidence in that process that the company decided to start launching commercial payloads during these first missions. By comparison, SpaceX has spent the last few years flying test versions of its massive Starship, but has continued to use dummy payloads while it troubleshoots the rocket.
SpaceX lost payloads later in its Falcon 9 program. In 2015, on the 19th Falcon 9 mission, the rocket exploded in mid-flight, losing an entire cargo spacecraft from the International Space Station. In 2016, a Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad during testing, causing the loss of an internet satellite for Meta.
