Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Then Loses AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Satellite – PCMag

The launch of AST SpaceMobile’s seventh full-size mobile-broadband satellite—its first on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket—started better than it ended on Sunday morning, when that heavy-lift vehicle’s upper stage left AST’s spacecraft in an orbit too low for it to stay in space.

Jeff Bezos’ space enterprise reported this “off-nominal orbit” in a post on X that did not clarify whether that outcome meant “satellite will need to burn up extra propellant to reach the right orbit” or “satellite will burn up on atmospheric re-entry in the coming days.”

Hours later, that clarification came in a statement from AST. “During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle,” it read in part. “While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its onboard thruster technology.”

AST says the satellite will be “de-orbited” and plans to recover its cost under its insurance policy.

On Monday, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp provided a little more detail in a post on X.

“While we are pleased with the nominal booster recovery, we clearly didn’t deliver the mission our customer wanted, and our team expects,” he wrote. “Early data suggest that on our second GS2 burn, one of the BE-3U engines didn’t produce sufficient thrust to reach our target orbit.”

Limp’s post also confirmed that Blue is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate the malfunction, but did not mention the FAA grounding the rocket, something the Orlando Sentinel reported Monday morning.

Everything seemed to have gone right with this launch before that second-stage underperformance. Blue’s New Glenn rocket—named after astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth—lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:25 a.m.

This was a second flight for that first stage, powered by seven BE-4 methane-fueled engines. This booster debuted on Nov. 13 on New Glenn’s second launch from Florida’s Space Coast, then successfully landed on the company’s autonomous landing-platform vessel Jacklyn.

The booster, which Blue nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” repeated that feat, briefly hovering just off the ship named after Bezos’ mother before transitioning itself over to the boat’s deck and setting itself down on six extended landing legs.

Experts following the launch via Blue’s YouTube livestream noted that the second stage’s two BE-3U hydrogen-fueled engines underperformed by an unclear margin. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell later cited early tracking data from the US Space Force that located the satellite in an orbit with a low point of just 96 miles up, commenting on Bluesky and X that it looked like AST’s satellite was “indeed toast.”

Monday, McDowell relayed a Space Force report that the satellite re-entered happened sometime Monday.

This BlueBird satellite, featuring a 2,400-square-foot array of solar panels and antennas, is AST’s second in that configuration, following one successfully launched by an LVM3 (Launch Vehicle Mark III) from India in December. AST had five smaller BlueBird models delivered by a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Florida in September 2024, plus one prototype launched in September 2022.

AST booked Blue Origin’s heavy-lift vehicle for this launch but elected to have New Glenn, which can send almost 50 tons to low Earth orbit, only carry one BlueBird instead of the six to eight that could fit under its payload fairing.

Texas-based AST has predicted it will have 45 BlueBird satellites in operation by the end of the year. It says the initial constellation will support direct-to-phone roaming with download speeds of up to 120Mbps for AT&T and Verizon, which chose AST over SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile, which is already in commercial operation for T-Mobile but offers only limited data connectivity.

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Even before this loss, AST’s calendar already looked daunting. Putting 39 more satellites in orbit this year, even with a stackable design that allows four to fit on a Falcon 9 (the one launch vehicle AST has signed up to use with good availability), would require AST to step up its cadence by a large degree.

“You don’t want to be doing one-off launches,” Scott Wisniewski, AST president and chief strategy officer, said in an interview with PCMag at MWC Barcelona in March.

Sunday’s AST statement said the company now has the next 25 BlueBird satellites in various stages of production and expects to ship the next three “in approximately 30 days,” which would be a few weeks behind the estimate Wisniewski offered in that interview.

New Glenn’s next launch, however, will not feature AST hardware. Instead, Blue Origin will test-fly its Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo-only lunar lander, which it’s now working to adapt into a version that could carry astronauts to the Moon earlier than the much larger Blue Moon Mark 2 that Blue has been developing for NASA under a $3.4 billion contract awarded in 2023 for its Artemis moon project.

Blue hopes to have a crewed version of what you could think of as Blue Moon Mark 1.5 ready for an orbital flight test in 2027 on NASA’s planned Artemis III mission, possibly alongside the version of SpaceX’s Starship that Elon Musk’s space firm began developing in 2021 for NASA under a $2.89 billion contract.

That’s an ambitious goal—if not as ambitious as delivering a completed human landing system in time for a planned 2028 Artemis IV mission to return astronauts to the Moon—that makes AST’s own plans look easy in comparison.

Editors’ Note: This story was updated with Limp’s comments and to correct the number of landing legs on New Glenn.