The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted the grounding restrictions on Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy-lift launch vehicle, allowing this new generation of “giant rocket” to continue its launch missions this year. During an April launch, the New Glenn upper stage failed to successfully place a commercial satellite into orbit, triggering a regulatory investigation and briefly grounding the rocket.
Blue Origin said in its latest statement that the New Glenn upper stage encountered "unusual thermal environmental conditions" during flight, causing one of its three engines to produce less thrust than expected. Affected by this, the AST SpaceMobile communication satellite that was originally responsible for being put into orbit by Blue Origin failed to complete the orbit and eventually burned up when re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. However, AST SpaceMobile has covered the cost of this loss through insurance.
The company has submitted an accident report to the FAA and said it had taken appropriate "corrective actions," but did not publicly disclose details of specific technical changes or process adjustments. Before the accident, this mission was New Glenn's third flight. Except for the upper stage failure, the rest of the flight was operating normally.
Despite the orbit failure, New Glenn achieved an important milestone on the same mission: Blue Origin successfully reused the New Glenn first-stage booster for the first time and recovered it again to an unmanned recovery ship at sea. For Blue Origin, which is trying to catch up with rivals in the reusable heavy-lift rocket market, the achievement is seen as an important step in validating its recycling and reuse technology.
With the FAA lifting the ban, New Glenn can return to its established rhythm of high-density launches this year. Blue Origin has previously said it plans to conduct up to 12 New Glenn launches by the end of 2026, but it's unclear how much the roughly month-long suspension will affect its established schedule and customer schedules. After the regulatory review is completed, how Blue Origin strikes a balance between safety redundancy and launch efficiency will also become a continued focus of the industry.