Blue Origin New Glenn misplaces AST SpaceMobile satellite

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket managed its first booster re-use on Sunday but failed at the part customers pay for: placing AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 communications satellite into its intended orbit.

According to TechCrunch, the rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 7:35 a.m. local time and the previously flown booster returned to land on a drone ship about 10 minutes later. Roughly two hours after launch, Blue Origin said the upper stage had delivered the payload to an “off-nominal orbit”. AST SpaceMobile later said the satellite separated and powered on, but was left in an orbit “lower than planned” and too low “to sustain operations”. The company said the spacecraft will now be de-orbited to burn up in the atmosphere.

The immediate financial damage is cushioned. AST SpaceMobile said the loss is covered by insurance and that follow-on BlueBird satellites will be completed in about a month. It also said it expects to launch 45 more satellites by the end of 2026, using multiple launch providers — a reminder that satellite operators increasingly build their business plans around redundancy, not loyalty.

For Blue Origin, the failure is more strategic than existential. New Glenn first flew in January 2025 after more than a decade in development, and this was only its third launch and second with a commercial payload. The company has been trying to move from the “it can fly” milestone to the harder “it can deliver reliably” standard that governs launch contracts and insurance pricing. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 reached that standard through volume and repetition, but not without public setbacks: a mid-flight failure on its 19th mission in 2015 and a 2016 pad explosion that destroyed a customer satellite.

The timing also matters because New Glenn is tied to government ambition. TechCrunch notes Blue Origin is pushing to become a major launch provider for NASA’s Artemis program and has been publicly pressed — by NASA and the Trump administration — to accelerate lunar timelines. Blue Origin has tested an early version of its lunar lander and is expected to attempt an uncrewed mission later this year. Last year, the company considered flying that lander on New Glenn’s third mission, but opted to launch the AST SpaceMobile satellite instead.

On Sunday, the rocket proved it can bring expensive hardware back to a floating platform in the Atlantic. It did not prove it can reliably deliver other people’s hardware to where it needs to be.