Blue Origin’s New Glenn put a customer satellite into the wrong orbit during its third launch

Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, successfully relaunched one of its New Glenn rockets for the first time on Sunday, but the company failed in its primary mission: delivering a communications satellite into orbit for customer AST SpaceMobile.

AST SpaceMobile released a statement Sunday afternoon that the upper stage of the New Glenn rocket placed the BlueBird 7 satellite into an orbit that was “lower than planned.” The satellite successfully separated from the rocket and was operational, the company said, but the altitude was too low “to be able to continue operating” and would now have to be de-orbited – left to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

The cost of the satellite loss is covered by AST SpaceMobile’s insurance, according to the company, and there are a series of BlueBird satellites to be completed in about a month. AST SpaceMobile has contracts with more than just Blue Origin, and the company said it expects to be able to launch 45 more into space by the end of 2026.

But this represents the first major failure of Blue Origin’s New Glenn program, which only had its first flight in January 2025 after more than a decade of development. This was New Glenn’s second mission to carry a customer payload into space, after launching twin spacecraft to Mars 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 far-reaching implications beyond Blue Origin’s immediate business ambitions. The company is pushing hard to become one of the main suppliers of NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon and beyond. The space agency – and the Trump administration – have put pressure on Blue Origin and SpaceX to be able to put people on the moon by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, before moving forward with returning people to the moon.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has even said that his company will “move heaven and earth” to help NASA return to the moon as soon as possible.

Blue Origin has just completed testing its first version of its lunar lander, which the company is expected to try to launch sometime this year (without crew). Blue Origin had suggested last year that it was considering launching the launcher on the third New Glenn site, but ultimately decided to launch the AST SpaceMobile satellite instead.

The third New Glenn launch appeared to be off to a good start on Sunday, when the mega-rocket lifted off at 7:35 a.m. local time from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the first time that Blue Origin reused a previously flown New Glenn booster – the same one that flew during the second New Glenn mission. About 10 minutes after takeoff, the booster returned to the ground and landed on the drone ship in the sea, just like it happened last November. Jeff Bezos even shared drone footage of the booster’s arrival on X, the social media platform owned by his rival Elon Musk. (Musk offered congratulations.)

However, about two hours after launch, Blue Origin announced in a post that the New Glenn upper stage had put the AST SpaceMobile satellite “into an illegal orbit.” The company has not released any other details since that post.

Blue Origin spent a long time developing New Glenn, and it was taken as a sign of confidence in that process that the company decided to begin commercial payloads during these first missions. In comparison, SpaceX has spent the past few years flying test versions of its massive Starship, but has stuck to using dummy payloads as it works out the rocket’s kinks.

SpaceX has lost payloads in depth in its Falcon 9 program. In 2015, on the 19th mission of Falcon 9, the rocket exploded in mid-flight and lost the International Space Station’s cargo spacecraft. In 2016, the Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad during a test, resulting in the loss of the Meta Internet satellite.