On Sunday local time in the United States, Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, made a major error during the third launch of its heavy-lift launch vehicle "New Glenn", sending a customer's communications satellite into the wrong orbit, causing the satellite to be unable to perform its scheduled mission.
This mission was originally to put a communications satellite named BlueBird 7 into orbit for satellite operator AST SpaceMobile. It was also the first flight in the history of the New Glenn rocket to reuse the first-stage booster, and was regarded as an important step towards mature commercialization of the project.
The New Glenn rocket's upper stage sent BlueBird 7 into a "lower than planned" orbit, AST SpaceMobile said in a statement Sunday afternoon.
Although the satellite successfully separated from the rocket and successfully started up, its current altitude was too low to support normal operations, and it eventually had to be deorbited, causing the satellite to burn up when it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.
AST SpaceMobile said the loss of the satellite was covered by insurance and that the company still has follow-up BlueBird satellites in hand and expects to complete manufacturing of the next batch of satellites in about a month.
The company has cooperated with multiple launch vehicle service providers and plans to send another 45 satellites into space by the end of 2026 to promote the deployment of its space mobile communication network.
Although the mission was a breakthrough in reuse, it was the first major mission failure for the New Glenn project.
New Glenn only completed its first flight in January 2025 after more than a decade of development and is still in the early stages of commercialization.
This is New Glenn's second mission for a paying customer, after successfully launching a pair of Gemini spacecraft to Mars on behalf of NASA last November.
Regarding this incident, Blue Origin has not provided further explanation, nor has it responded to media requests for comment.
It is generally believed that this suspected failure in the New Glenn second stage will not only affect Blue Origin’s short-term commercial missions, but may also affect its important position in the deep space exploration competition.
Blue Origin is working hard to become one of the main providers of launch services for NASA’s Artemis (lunar exploration) program and subsequent missions.
NASA and the Trump administration are pressuring Blue Origin and SpaceX to send a lunar module to the moon before the end of President Trump's second term, and ultimately achieve the goal of returning humans to the lunar surface again.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has publicly stated that the company will do "whatever it takes" to speed up NASA's return to the moon.
Currently, Blue Origin has completed testing of its first lunar lander, and is scheduled to conduct an unmanned test flight this year.
The company revealed last year that it had considered flying the lander on New Glenn's third launch mission, but ultimately decided to use the opportunity for a commercial launch for AST SpaceMobile, delaying the lunar mission.
Judging from the flight process, New Glenn successfully ignited and took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at around 7:35 a.m. on Sunday, and the take-off phase went smoothly.
This mission used a first-stage booster that had flown on New Glenn's second mission. It was also the first time that a booster was reused on this rocket.
About 10 minutes later, the booster returned as planned and landed vertically on an unmanned recovery ship at sea, repeating the scene of the successful recovery last November.
Blue Origin founder Bezos later posted drone footage of the booster landing on social platform X, while platform owner Elon Musk also posted congratulations on the same platform.
The real problem came more than two hours later. Blue Origin announced on X that the New Glenn upper stage had put AST SpaceMobile’s satellite into an “off-nominal orbit.”
Since that news, Blue Origin has not released more technical details. The outside world can only infer based on customer announcements that this was a failure with a significantly low orbital injection altitude.
New Glenn’s development cycle is long, and Blue Origin was considered to have extended ground testing in exchange for higher reliability.
Because of this, the outside world generally regards the company's launch of paid commercial payloads in the early flight stage as a reflection of its confidence in the maturity of the system.
In contrast, competitor SpaceX has mainly used its giant "Starship" to perform test flight missions in the past few years, and has long used simulated payloads to prioritize solving technical problems with the rocket itself.
However, even for relatively mature reusable rocket systems, it is difficult to completely avoid failures during service.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 has also lost cargo spacecraft and commercial satellites during its development: in 2015, the 19th Falcon 9 mission exploded in flight, and a cargo spacecraft carrying supplies to the International Space Station was lost; and in 2016, a Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad during the ground test phase, causing the scrapping of an Internet satellite launched for Meta.
In the commercial aerospace industry, such accidents are not only a manifestation of technical risks, but also often prompt launch vehicle manufacturers and customers to optimize designs and improve verification processes in order to improve reliability in subsequent missions.